Review: Alcatraz is home to the last remaining zoo in Emma Sloley’s resilient ‘The Island of Last Things’

Hundreds to thousands of animal species go extinct every year, according to the World Wildlife Fund, and things are projected to get even worse if climate change continues unabated. A new novel by U.S.-based Australian writer Emma Sloley, “The Island of Last Things,” imagines a time in the nearish future when not only animals but whole ecosystems of living things have been wiped out, leaving a handful of surviving zoos around the globe attempting to preserve the species in their care. Except that those zoos close, one by one, due to a multitude of reasons: insufficient funding, a movement protesting the care and feeding of (nonhuman) animals in a time of mass human suffering and a deadly strain of C andida spreading through the wildlife population. The last remaining zoo sits on Al