Parts per Million

"Deftly layering humor with strong rhetoric, Parts per Million is inspiring with its fights against the status quo.”
—Foreword Reviews

"Parts per Million effortlessly weaves the personal with the political in this relentless page-turner. Part psychological thriller, part hard-boiled noir, the characters are fresh, real and alive. With a lightness of touch and an uncanny ear for great dialogue, Julia Stoops tells the story of four activists in a time of war, their moral and emotional conflicts, their betrayals and their small acts of heroism. Parts per Million reads like the bastard offspring of Graham Greene and Naomi Klein."

—Robert Newman, author of The Fountain at the Center of the World

“While Julia Stoops documents activism of the early 2000s, Parts per Million couldn’t feel more relevant today. The struggle to remain faithful to the ideals—and hard work—of activism, the thrill of the rare, hard-won victory, and the navigating of personal politics, gives this book a thrilling narrative and makes it an inspired wake-up call to all of our inner activists."

—Ben Parzybok, author of Sherwood Nation

"The little-known history of West Coast, Left Coast eco-activism in the early Aughts bursts to life in this timely and important book, full of finely drawn characters and outrageous intrigues. Eco-fiction at its finest, Parts per Million is one of the origin stories of the resistance, and a primer for the fight to come."

—Susan DeFreitas, author of Hot Season

“Parts per Million is a cry for justice and a journey through the heart. Julia Stoops brilliantly conjures the social and political unrest of the early 2000s. The war drums, the resistance, the secretive birth of the surveillance state—all lit by deep emotional honesty. Stoops’ keen eye sweeps us into the lives of three Portland activists—separate souls shakily united by a cause, a house, and a radiant artist/ex-junkie named Deirdre, who simultaneously illuminates and complicates their struggles. Compelling and deeply compassionate, Parts per Million takes us to a time and place we thought we could forget, but can’t, and shouldn’t. Reading it may be the surest way to understand who we were then, and—in the tumult of our times—who we need to be today.”

—Scott Sparling, author of Wire to Wire

"In her carefully thought-out debut novel Parts per Million, Julia Stoops gives us a team of young, and not-so-young political activists at the beginning of the twenty-first century, working overtime to correct what they see as dangerous if not disastrous forces at work in the American political status quo. Stoops’ adroit involvement of digital technology in the story gives a lively real-world edge to the presentation. Like a heartbeat against the center of the novel’s environmental and war concerns is a love relationship laden with hopes, dreams and challenges familiar to the times. Parts per Million is a timely and stimulating fictional look at the difficult and too often thankless task of defending the planet."

—Harold Johnson, author of The Fort Showalter Blues

"The page-turning plot would be reason enough to read Parts per Million, but Julia Stoops gives us characters so fully developed the novel feels like theater-in-the-round. The questions they ask themselves are central to our times—how do we live ethical lives in the face of so much institutionalized greed? If the personal is political, how can we turn away from anyone in crisis? Stoops takes us on a joyride through the political turmoil of the early twenty-first century, bringing anti-war protests and direct action environmentalists vividly to life. Her characters may wear their political hearts on their sleeves, but it’s their internal struggles that capture our attention, and make this story such a rich and timely read."

—Stevan Allred, author of A Simplified Map of the Real World

Activist fiction is popular with the media, booksellers, and readers in the wake of Trump’s election. Many indie booksellers have featured politically relevant titles on endcaps and tables; Parts per Million is set in 2002 and features anti-war protests and weapons contract fraud at the start of the Iraq war. Artist Gabriel Liston will create full-page illustrations for each of the parts of the book, plus a half-page epilogue image. A successful Kickstarter campaign raised $5,000 toward the illustrations and proves that there is significant support for this project. Julia Stoops’s international background should help increase the range of the title. The stranger-comes-to-town plot turns into a page-turning thriller, offering a quick pace and relationship intrigue layered with the political updates. Portland, Oregon, setting will maximize interest from Northwest booksellers and readers—one of Forest Avenue’s strongest bases. American media continues to focus on Portland, in terms of feature stories and cultural updates, which should help increase visibility of a locally-set title. Parts per Million is part thriller, part political, featuring three unlikely roommates, so the relationships are central to the story as with any good literary fiction.