The High House: Shortlisted for the Costa Best Novel Award

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It is beautifully, beautifully written. I only highlighted the four passages, but there were plenty of others I could have chosen from. (I didn’t, because a lot of them already were highlighted and it makes me feel so lame to just copy over the stuff that’s already been highlighted.)

The High House by Honor Arundel | Goodreads The High House by Honor Arundel | Goodreads

Jessie Greengrass’s vision of a near-future Britain drowned by an apocalyptic flood, part of the expanding genre of climate-change fiction, is among the books shortlisted for the 2021 Costa book awards. The attic floor is home to the Staffordshire Yeomanry Regiment Museum, founded in 1794. As a local volunteer force the Yeomanry saw active service for over 200 years. The extensive range of items on display reflects their illustrious and distinguished history. Royalty was welcomed to the house in 1642 when King Charles I stayed there en route to Shrewsbury, and the house retains an extensive collection of period furniture and architectural features. It is also the home of the Staffordshire Yeomanry Museum.

Timely and terrifying … 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.” 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: Jessie Greengrass’s first novel, ‘Sight’ was shortlisted for the 2018 Women’s Prize for fiction. While I haven’t read that one, reading this one, her sophomore novel, makes me consider that substantially skillful writing will be a factor in all her work. Digging into the perspective of three characters on the cusp of global warming’s altering of the physical and social landscape, Greengrass also explores the intimate layers of the solitary experience. I cared about every character, even the distancing Francesca, a climate scientist and activist, who consistently leaves the care of her young child, Pauly, in the care of his teenage half-sister, Caro, to go off and try to make a dent in the geopolitics of a world where catastrophic weather events were occurring with more frequency and greater cost. We know from the start what has happened and then are being told how it happened from the different perspectives of our three protagonists. This structure works really well for dramatic effect.

The High House” Takes a Surviving the End of the World in “The High House” Takes a

she went on, speaking with such fierceness that I thought her words might drill holes through the lath and plaster to let her out of the room, out of our lives, That evening, Francesca came home. I don’t know where she had been, but she smelled of mold and filthy water and she was exhausted. She looked thin. After Pauly was in bed, I sat with her and father at the kitchen table.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). The high house sits above the waterline on an unnamed stretch of the English coast, some time in the near future. Below it lies a now-drowned world, carnage of a meteorological event of unprecedented destruction. “Each year, between water and neglect, less and less of the village remains,” reports Sally, the first of three narrators. “Grass grows in tufts from walls. Silt covers gardens. Crabs run across broken cobbles of the road.” I enjoyed this novel’s beautiful writing, a story almost gentile, full of love, although about a horrendous and chilling future. It is a story about the love for a child, the maternal drive to save a child. If only we saw all children as our own, perhaps we would find the strength to change our lives and alter what seems to be an inevitable future.

The High House by Jessie Greengrass review - The Guardian

In this case I am glad I read it. It is indeed quite a bleak novel but also a very good and well-written one. There is warmth too, and round characters. It managed to make me reflect on all that would be lost if we reach a tipping point. How will they adapt? How can humans learn to live together in a world where it’s no longer social status—acquired through heritage or wealth—that rules, but rather survival, which depends on having a piece of land you can grow your own food on, one that’s high enough and not covered by seawater?

Every week there is news about how the world is changing. The polar ice melting, flooding, wildfires, extreme weather. We have been warned for so many years about the future of the earth, and we still think it is in the future. But it is here. 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. 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 murky water continued to advance, crossing the street, right up to the edge of my building. Because I don't live on the ground floor, I wasn't worried about my apartment getting flooded. Yet I was still gripped by a feeling of apprehension, of dread. I couldn't stop watching. If there’s no point. We could stay together, for a while at least. Caro is unhappy. Paul too, probably, although I agree it’s harder to tell.