The High House: Shortlisted for the Costa Best Novel Award

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This book is set in the near future, but we don’t know how near that future is. All we know is that, given the rising sea levels brought on by climate change, any island country could be engulfed by the ocean within a matter of decades—a story that may well become reality for the next generation of readers. Greengrass writes: he asked, and I shrugged one shoulder up and slid my eyes away. There had been daffodils in the park at Christmas. The coast path had been redrawn at six different places over the last three years.

that we are now looking at a future in which we no longer have fair warning of extreme weather events? As scientists we are used to remaining in one place. We tell ourselves that it is our job only to present the evidence—but such neutrality has become a fantasy. The time for it is past. At the High House, Caro and Pauly settle in with Grandy, the former village caretaker, and his granddaughter Sally, who Francesca entrusted to care for the house. Once a summer home, it has been transformed into an environmentalist’s bunker, with a generator and a barn full of supplies. As floods threaten the village and the coast, the four of them eke out a life, working to adapt to the changing seasons, the disastrous news, and the crushing fear of the crises still ahead. A tender and urgent novel about a found family, The High House is an intimate, emotionally precise exploration of what can be salvaged, and what makes life worth living—even at the end of the world. The question with all cli-fi is what the reader should actually do with the warnings it aims to deliver. And this is where The High House stands out, for Greengrass understands that perhaps the best writers and artists can hope for now is to help us admit, accept and process our collective failure to act. From the far side of disaster, Caro recalls people persisting with “the commutes and holidays, the Friday big shops, day trips to the countryside, afternoons in the park. We did these things not out of ignorance, nor through thoughtlessness, but only because there seemed nothing else to do.”Timely and terrifying second novel ... The High House stands out for our investment in its characters’ fates ... Hope survives even a worst-case scenario, it seems. And yet, what remains with the reader is this: Let’s not let things get to that point.”

By the time Caro turns eighteen, she has left school and has no plans; she watches as her life stretches “empty ahead,” as hills become islands and city centers drown. Daffodils appear in the park in December; February brings hot summer days. Bees, birds, and grasshoppers are nowhere to be heard.

I loved the tide pool, then. Even now, when we are so reliant on it, I regret the loss of its wildness, the way it was before Francesca restored the mill, when reeds grew down close around its edges and small creatures rustled in and out of them, going about their secret business. I loved how still it was, the way the water rose and fell, creeping rippleless up the banks, the way its surface shone when sunlight caught it—but father was afraid of me falling in, or getting caught in the mud, so I wasn’t allowed to go near it by myself. In the afternoon, Francesca put her laptop on the kitchen table while she made oat bars and, sitting with my feet propped up on Pauly’s high chair, eating raisins she had spilled, I watched news footage of families hunched under tarpaulins. They looked resigned, as though they already understood what they had become a part of, and I tried to stop myself from crying because I was ashamed of my tears, which were neither compassionate, nor empathic, nor kind, but came because I was afraid, very suddenly and directly, for myself. Moving…Greengrass excels in her account of this makeshift family—the sweet but fading Grandy, the two women who often see themselves as rivals, and the curious, growing, bird-crazy Pauly—and their attempts to live on and with and through a land that is increasingly inhospitable…[A] poignant, impressive contribution to an ever growing genre, the fiction of climate catastrophe.” What will you do? father asked me again, and Francesca said, That’s a pretty stupid question, under the circumstances. If she thinks that, then what’s she doing at the high house? She knows there’ll be something left. A ruined living, maybe, and a hard world, but hasn’t it always been that for most? All I can think is that what’s different now is that no one can claim this is progress.