Moraine follows Dolma, a widow near sixty who keeps a small trekkers' lodge in the Himalayan village of Thame, through the two years that begin on the morning a glacial lake above her home breaks its wall.
Dolma is at the Namche market with her ten-year-old granddaughter, Yangzum, when a curtain of grey dust rises over the mountain. No one dies. Everything else is lost: the house her husband Furbu built stone by stone, the school on the knoll, the signboard, and the crooked rafter he swore bore more weight than any straight one.
Her son Tenzing, an engineer at a hydropower station, begs her to leave for Kathmandu. Dolma refuses. She will not live anywhere she cannot hear her river. She begins to search the mud for what survived and to return it, one object at a time, to its owners. A young glaciologist, Rinzin Tamang, arrives to set sensors above the lakes. When the first siren sounds and proves a false alarm, Dolma must stand before an angry village and say what the silence of the previous August cost.
Meanwhile the same warming that floods one valley parches another. In the cracked rice fields of Chitwan, Tenzing meets a farmer ruined by drought and by a war-driven price of fertilizer. In Mustang, Dolma meets the families of Dhye and Samjong, whose springs ran dry and who now live as the first climate refugees of Nepal, with no legal category, no file and no deed. Wherever she looks she finds the same quiet machinery of forms, loans and delay.
Out of these meetings, and out of her own long-held stubbornness, Dolma learns that staying and surviving are different things, and that to stay is itself a kind of work. The village builds a new school from the stones of the river. The crooked rafter is raised again. And on the evening a Prime Minister speaks the name of a vanished village before the United Nations, an old woman rings a bell on a small veranda and listens to a river that has changed its voice.
Moraine is a literary novel of grief, memory and endurance. It is about what a house really is, who pays for a changing climate, and the slow, unglamorous courage of those who rebuild.
