A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters

In 1986, a woman named Kath closely follows the news of the Chernobyl disaster. Her narration alternates between first and third person. She believes that “everything is connected,” and she feels both validated and horrified when she learns that a cloud of toxic nuclear gas has entered the water supply in a Norwegian pasture, infecting the lichen there which in turn affected the local reindeer. Kath becomes obsessed with the Norwegian government’s dilemma over what to do with the reindeer carcasses, but no one around her understands her fixation. She gives up eating meat and moves to Australia, away from the contaminated air in the north.

Kath frequently argues with her boyfriend Greg about their pet cat. He wanted to have the cat declawed and neutered, but she refused. They never talk about the growing international tension among the world’s nuclear powers. Greg insists politics are “men’s business,” but Kath wonders if the women might be more in tune with the workings of the world. She senses an impending crisis that Greg ignores, so she leaves home and takes a boat out to sea. She brings her pet cat and a stray cat she finds along the way.

As she drifts out to sea, Kath doesn’t keep track of where she is going because she knows she can never return to where she left. As time passes, she doesn’t bother to keep track of the days, since she sees the calendar as another part of the man-made system that distances itself from the natural world. She rations her food and catches fish to share with her cats. She imagines other people like her who escaped the end of the world, and she thinks about an article she read about ships. In the past, ships had a place for lookouts to scout for trouble or castaways in need of help, but modern ships do not. 

Kath has recurring nightmares about lying surrounded by men with a pain in her arm. One day she sees land, but the engine’s fuel runs out before she can reach it. When the two cats mate, Kath realizes that she should have gotten pregnant before she left, and that impregnating her was what Greg came into her life for. She wonders if Greg has survived the end of the world. She recalls how men often told her she didn’t make “the right connections,” but she thinks the same about them. In Kath’s dream, she is in a hospital, and a doctor tells her she has been attacking men to try to have sex.

Kath and her cats reach an island, but her nightmares continue. She decides that she must have been poisoned, and she develops a deep distrust of the male doctor in her dream. He tells her she has been pulling out her own hair, but she insists that it is falling out on its own. He tries to persuade her to talk about Greg instead of the boat, suggesting that Greg breaking up with her triggered the breakdown that caused Kath to believe the world had descended into nuclear war. He explains that authorities found Kath driving the boat around in circles with two half-starved cats.

Kath wakes from the nightmare and decides not to speak to the doctors again. She comes to terms with her impending death, and she reiterates the importance of seeing things as they really are. The female cat gives birth, and Kath is filled with hope upon seeing the kittens.