When we arrived, I took him inside, helped him to take off his coat, watched him hang it on his peg. Even Carys Bray’s ostensibly more conservative When the Lights Go Out uses the backdrop of a dying world to explore the particulars of a declining marriage, while Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind (although not strictly cli-fi) did something interesting with the classic disaster novel trope by creating a post-apocalyptic chiller comedy-of-manners hybrid. Now she was making bread, and when she heard me she came running out through the open kitchen doors, wiping her hands on her jeans, leaving two white trails of flour. The high house isn’t high, really, but only higher than the land around it, so that when it was first built, before the river had been banked and the cuts made to drain the land, when the rain was heavy and the tide was up and the water spread where it wanted, the house would have been an island, almost, with only the westerly part of its land unflooded, a causeway above the waterline joining the house to the heath.

The High House | Book by Jessie Greengrass | Official The High House | Book by Jessie Greengrass | Official

I knew how to occupy myself in my own way, in my own world, which was separate from father or from Francesca—which was private. Francesca might brand these lethal distractions in the face of impending doom, but Greengrass suggests they are a form of self-protection. It was often hot, in July and August when I was a child, although not in the way that it became later, when summers lasted half the year and every day was a white sun in a pale sky. We watched as an ordinary piazza in a far-off seaside town came apart, its street signs snapped, lampposts buckled, the café on the corner split open like an egg. It is forbidden to copy anything for publication elsewhere without written permission from the copyright holder.The High House was one of several books submitted for the novel prize to tackle environmental themes, said judge and author Jessie Burton, describing books that were “preoccupied with rising waters, the world heating up, the decimation of natural wildlife and the effects of humans on the land”. At first the path was tarmacked and the river in its well-cut bed ran slow and brown, but soon we were out into fields, green beet tops, and maize, and wheat. When I first came here, for summer holidays with Francesca and with father, damp patches spread around the corners of the downstairs rooms.

The High House by Jessie Greengrass | Book review | The TLS The High House by Jessie Greengrass | Book review | The TLS

They didn’t say that there were families living in caravans in service stations all along the M5, lined up in the parking lots with volunteers running aid stations out of the garage forecourts. How warm Pauly was in my lap, how comfortable, how soft, and how it must have hurt Francesca then to be in the next room, alone, and to have the truth confirmed: it wasn’t that Pauly didn’t talk at all, but only that he didn’t talk to her. Night Shyamalan’s Signs depicts an alien invasion: through the eyes of a single family, in and around their rural home … It’s a bleak yet somehow soothing novel about parenting while the world is falling apart, but also about finding magic in the sma Unspooling backwards, we learn the genesis of this makeshift family – half-siblings Caro and Pauly, and their protector, Sally – alone at the end of the world, sifting through their grief and measuring out their solitary days in hard work: “This is what we do now.I walked as quickly as I could around the nearby streets, but there was no cab office and I was afraid to leave Pauly too long in case he wandered off, or someone came and found him. We did these things not out of ignorance, nor through thoughtlessness, but only because there seemed nothing else to do. Pauly was nearly four then, and he was still reserved with strangers but had, when it was only the two of us, the ability to forget himself in joy. Even father now seemed to chafe when he was at home, fidgeting as though he would rather be elsewhere, away with Francesca, and not stuck with us, in our dull routine.

The High House: Shortlisted for the Costa Best Novel Award The High House: Shortlisted for the Costa Best Novel Award

Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. It would have been used to grind wheat, when it was built—and now it turns again and powers our generator, which gives us light in winter for as long as we have the bulbs, and runs the fridge in summer. Caro’s father and stepmother are on the campaign trail when a series of devastating storms hit; there’s just enough time to phone Caro and tell her to take Pauly to the High House, where the two meet Sal and Grandy for the first time. And all the while, outside, the thing that only she could look at straight: the early springs and too-long summers, the sudden, unpredictable winters that came from nowhere and brought floods or ice or wind, or didn’t come, so that there was only day after day of sticky dampness and the leaves rotting on the trees and the birds still singing in December, nesting, until the snow came at last and, having overlooked migration, they froze on the branches, and they died. Pauly and I went on day trips, into the forest to the east of the city to feel the trees make their own cool, or west, to swim in the river.Take Jenny Offill’s Weather, its fragmented structure mimicking her narrator’s experience of everyday anxieties rubbing up against overwhelming fears about “the coming chaos”. It was approaching dark by the time I saw the sea, a thin gray line on the horizon, and Pauly had fallen asleep, his head resting loose on my shoulder. Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published. After that I went into the kitchen, where there were no mugs waiting to be washed, and into the bathroom, where the towel hung clean and folded and the soap sat square in its dish. In those first years, before Pauly was born, after Francesca came to live with me and father, we used to come here for our summer holiday, the three of us spreading out through the rooms of the high house, all into our different places.