In a forseeable future where climate change has severely affected weather and agriculture, the North End of an unnamed city has long been abandoned in favor of the neighboring South End. Apart from the scavengers steadily stripping the vacant town to its bones, just a few thousand people stay, articles to live silently among the crumbling metropolis. Many, just like the narrator, are there to try to get away the demons of their past. He spends his period observing and documenting the decay around him, trying about THE TOWN Where We Once Lived to bury recollections of what he provides lost.

But it ultimately becomes very clear that things are unraveling somewhere else as well, as strangers, violent and desperate alike, begin to appear in the North End, spreading term of social and political deterioration in the South End and beyond. Confronted with a growing disruption to his isolated life, the narrator discovers within himself a surprising need to withstand losing the home he has generated within this unfilled place. He and all of those other citizens from the North End must choose whether to handle outsiders as invaders or pleasant them as neighbors.

The City Where We Once Lived is a haunting novel of the longer term that combines a prescient take a look at how climate change and industrial flight will shape the world using a deeply personal tale of one guy running from his past. With glowing prose, Eric Barnes brings into razor-sharp focus queries of how we come to call a place home and what is our capacity for violence when that home becomes threatened.