The Clean Planet

From a converted copra warehouse in Apia, Sione Leota watches a map streaming health data from fourteen thousand monitoring nodes across the Pacific. One morning it flags Pukapuka, a Cook Islands atoll where seventeen people have a respiratory illness the algorithm can't quite categorize. Protocol says mobilize. But Pukapuka's elders have refused outside health teams for sixty years, since a rescue that never asked what kind of life they wanted to save.

Sione asks before he acts. Around that choice gather an Auckland epidemiologist, a Darwin logistics chief, a Fijian doctor living on the atoll, a Tongan elder who translates between worlds, and an Albanian marine scientist who reads oceans like faces. It is a novel about the last mile of public health, and about who decides what healing means.