4.5 stars. This book is stunning. I mean that it will stun you, with its beautifully written descriptions of nature (some passages reminded me of the marsh's descriptions in Where the Crawdads Sing) but it will also stun you with dread. It is a story of survival, but not in an action-y, fast-paced, detailed way. It is reflective and centered around one specific family. The story is told through the eyes of three narrators: Sally, who grew up in a coastal village with her grandad, who she calls Grandy; Caro (daughter of "father" who will remain nameless and step-daughter of Francesca - I'll come back to her in a minute) and to a lesser extent, Pauly, Francesca's son who is being cared for by Caro. They have all taken refuge in an isolated house on a hill (The High House) which has been stocked by the aforementioned father and Francesca.

I personally really, really enjoyed this book, I devoured it. But... it is a tough read because of its subject matter. Francesca as a scientist, knows that the planet is doomed, as no one seems to be willing to accept the cold hard facts about the climate crisis. Yet even she chooses to have a child, then works tirelessly to prepare this cocoon where they will be able to "weather the storm".

What I loved:
- The language used, which was a mix of simple dialogues and descriptions, with specific language related to birds and the sea. I looked a few words up out of curiosity (but not doing so would not prevent you from enjoying the book and understanding the plot!) Some examples: sluice, awl, gorse, limpet, pantiled, shingle spit, crofting, winceyette, chancel, bittern, curlew, dunlin...
- The overarching theme of the climate crisis. I have read a few non-fiction book about global heating, but I find myself craving representations of it in fiction. Dystopian stories often don't develop this angle - I particularly enjoyed how the seasons were being described.
- Grandy's character. I loved every single line written about him.
- Pauly and his questions and behaviour as a boy - some passages were pretty funny!

Some tiny tweaks would have made it a definite 5-star read for me:
- The timeline was sometime confusing for me, narrators recalling events from previous years a bit randomly, so much so that I sometimes had to reread some sentences and look for some clues to see if the passage was a flashback or not. In hindsight, this was probably intentional to add to the ominous, claustrophobic effect...
- A couple of the characters' narrative voices were a bit too similar.
- I did not really understand why the dad remained nameless, and why Caro had so much resentment towards Francesca. Both parents could (should?) have been more fleshed out.
- I found the book too short! I wanted to know more about the kind of life they had in the house... I won't go into any more detail as I want to keep this review spoiler free.

In a nutshell: this is a sad and beautiful book about an anxiety-inducing topic. An important read. I am grateful to @lovemyread for including this book in my April box. After ordering it, I was also given a free copy by Net Galley and Swift Press in exchange for an honest review.

'The High House' quietly destroyed me, because it portrays an oncoming future that I already believe in.

That aside, this is an incredibly unique piece of climate fiction. I've never quite come across one like it - the way it focuses on the liminal space between our present, and the dystopic, climate-broken future that inevitably awaits us.

I am often frustrated by lack of plot in literary fiction, and perhaps one could level that charge at 'The High House', because I suppose it doesn't follow usual conventions. But I found such beauty and poignancy in all the little moments described, in the characters' relationships. In one way, it feels like a braid of short stories, which is perhaps in part due to the short length of most chapters (some pages only contain a single paragraph).

There is nothing else to say, except that I was gripped, and I was devastated.

(With thanks to Swift Press and NetGalley for this ebook in exchange for an honest review)

"The whole complicated system of modernity which had held us up, away from the earth, was crumbling, and we were becoming again what we had used to be: cold, and frightened of the weather, and frightened of the dark. Somehow, while we had all been busy, while we had been doing those small things which added up to living, the future had slipped into the present – and, despite the fact that we had known that it would come, the overwhelming feeling, now that it was here, was of surprise, like waking up one morning to find that you had been young, and now, all at once, you weren’t."

This book is one of the first published by Swift Press, a new independent publishing company launched in 2020 and part of the Independent Alliance.

It is written by Jessie Greengrass, author of “Sight”, a book which received some mixed reviews but that was in my view very deservedly shortlisted for the 2018 Women’s Prize. That book was at heart a meditation on motherhood, with the narrator reflecting on her relationships with her mother, her psychoanalyst grandmother and her unborn daughter, but also featured a range of scientific and medical figures such as Wilhelm Röntgen, Sigmund Freud, John Hunter and Jan van Rymsdyk as well as recurring themes of stripping apart, examination, transitions, boundaries, and the difference and interaction between the superficial and deep.

One of the many any quotes I highlighted in that book (my copy was a forest of post in notes) was one from the narrator’s grandmother:

“Without reflection, without the capacity to trace our lives backwards and pick the patterns out, we become liable to act as animals do, minus foresight and according to a set of governing laws, which we have never taken the trouble to explore. Without reflection, we do little more than drift upon the surface of things and self-determination is an illusion.”

And I think that quote has some interesting follow up in this book – a book which is ostensibly very different in fact the author has said (in an inews interview) “I felt strongly that I couldn’t do the same thing again ……. I wanted to write more of a novelly novel.” which the article then goes on to say means “one with a strong plot and characters who bear no direct resemblance to their author.”

And this book is effectively a Cli-Fi book, one which will I think be interesting for fans of Jenny Offil’s “Weather” while being very different in style from that to.

The set up of the novel is clear from very early on – as this is a novel which starts at the near-end and then goes back in time to help us see how we arrived there. Francesca, is a famous environmental scientist and activist and one who identifies that the planet is much closer to a cataclysmic climatological tipping point than the vast majority of the developed world who inhabit a duality of climate change panic and everyday living.

"She didn’t have the habit that the rest of us were learning of having our minds in two places at once, of seeing two futures – that ordinary one of summer holidays and new school terms, of Christmases and birthdays and bank accounts in an endless, uneventful round, and the other one, the long and empty one we spoke about in hypotheticals, or didn’t speak about at all."

When she decides to have a child

"Rather, it was a kind of furious defiance that had led her to have a child, despite all she believed about the future – a kind of pact with the world that, having increased her stake in it, she should try to protect what she had found to love."

She decides to prepare in advance something of a sanctuary for him to flee to when the crisis strikes – a holiday home somewhere on the East Coast (I think possibly Suffolk) of England, in a holiday home on high ground in a remote ex-fishing now second-home tourist village. She equips the home with a barn stocked full of provisions, a water-driven electrical generator, vegetable garden, spare boat (despite being someway above the sea); she arranges for a local man Grandy (who acts as odd job man for all the local holiday homes before a cardiac incident) and his daughter Sal to move to the house as live-in caretakers; and shortly before she and her husband are killed in the aftermath of a storm hitting (I think) Miami she asks her husband’s daughter – Caro – who has become Pauly’s de-factor carer to take him to the house.

The story is told in interspersed first party accounts by Caro, Sal and (to a lesser extent) Pauly – in in a rather languid and elegaic prose spaced out on the page.

This is a novel which is very much about loss and mourning but also about how we, as humans, are unable to process that loss until after it happens, even when we objectively should be able to see that it is coming.

The village is just along the coast from a once thriving port town whose demise occurred both in a single event centuries before – a storm which washed away both the spit which protected its natural harbour and permanently moved the river mouth around which it was based – and then over many years as the town was subject to coastal erosion.

I was very much reminded of two books I recently read - “Shifting Sands – The Rise and Fall of the Glaven Ports” by Godfrey Sayers, and of the fate of Dunwich captured in Sebald’s “Rings of Saturn”. I was also reminded of the various societies examined by Jared Diamond in his “Collapse” such as the Easter Island and the Greensland Norse.

One of the most striking images in the book is of the fall of the last main building – the pub – with the locals having one last drink even as the pub was washed away around them.

But those events and this one were local

"—it wasn’t the end of any world beyond this one. Neither the flood, nor the storm. A few square miles and a handful of people. The same things have happened everywhere, always. But isn’t every ending absolute to those who live through it?"

And the book itself covers an ending which is worldwide – but which again people are unwilling to face up to until too late.

I was reminded of many other examples: Imperial (the centuries leading to the Fall of Rome), Geopolitical (the World in the first 14 or so years of the 20th Century), Economical (the Roaring Twenties and later the Great Moderation).

This theme of loss and of not acting until it is too late also cleverly is reflected in the many relationships in the book – for example between Sal and her Grandy, Caro and Pauly, relationships whole gradual change goes unnoticed until fate or another person forces realisation (for example it takes Francesca’s quizzing of Grandy on the history of the area for Sal to realise how far she drifted from Grandy and her home village while absorbed in University life).

There are I think a few missteps. Although no natural historian – I was not sure the badger and even some of the bird adaptions to climate change quite made sense. The fate of the town seemed to me to rather mix up cliff edge collapse and gradual flooding. And the sections of Sal and Caro could for me only really be differentiated more in their content rather than in their first person voices.

But overall I found this a quietly powerful novel by a brilliant author.

"—You think that you have time. And then, all at once, you don’t."

I was immediately gripped by this book and finished it in two sittings. Essentially a book about the impact of dramatic climate change on what becomes a loosely thrown-together family. It’s deeply affecting without ever feeling overdone or improbable. I was particularly struck by the emotional complexity of the characters, who could easily have been one-dimensional in the hands of a less adept writer. A beguiling story, perfect for now.