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Chilling and beautifully realised, each small detail taking us towards an unbearable truth. A novel of tender intimacies and vast scope." The High House is written from the POV of three characters - a young woman who grew up with her grandfather along the British coast, a young woman whose step-mother is a climate change activist, and the little boy who is her step-brother. Pauly is so young when disaster strikes that much of his understanding of reality is grounded in his life in the High House; he has “forgotten an entire world,” he reflects. Do you think this gives him a greater capacity for happiness or contentedness than the others? Why or why not? Perched on a sloping hill, set away from a small town by the sea, the High House has a tide pool and a mill, a vegetable garden, and, most importantly, a barn full of supplies. Caro, Pauly, Sally, and Grandy are safe, so far, from the rising water that threatens to destroy the town and that has, perhaps, already destroyed everything else. But for how long? Eine sehr nahe, sehr realistische Zukunft wird also konzipiert, in der unsere Welt, respektive die Menschheit, infolge des Klimawandels nach und nach untergeht. Die Protagonisten in Form einer Klima-Aktivistenfamilie, die Eltern beide aus dem universitären Bereich, haben jahrelang gewarnt, versucht, die Öffentlichkeit mit Vorträgen, Artikeln und Aktionen aufzurütteln, aber nichts wurde unternommen.
The High House imagines England after a Jessie Greengrass’s The High House imagines England after a
Caro and Sally vie to mother Pauly. Each needs him. Their maternal instincts keep him safe and healthy. He doesn’t remember the old world or his parents. He is content, adaptable. It used to be that Pauly needed me, and so I looked after him. I thought it was as simple as a question and its answer, and didn’t think about the ways that his small person might be an answer to something in its turn. Now things are the other way about. On bad days, when I can’t sit still, when my head aches and I want to sleep but sleep won’t come, when my longing for father and for Francesca is so great that I can hardly stand it, then I follow Pauly around. I shadow him. I know he finds it hard. I know that I should pull myself together.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.” We made our way across the busy concourse, found the platform, found the train. Found seats. Sat down. I left school for good at lunchtime on the day I turned eighteen. I walked home. The house was empty. I had no plans, either for the afternoon, or for the time beyond it – my life, which stretched empty ahead. Or didn’t. It was becoming clear to everyone, now, that things were getting worse. The winter before, half of Gloucestershire had been flooded, and the waters, refusing to recede, had made a new fen, covering homes and fields, roads and schools. In York, the river had burst its banks and the city centre was gone, walls which had stood for nearly two millennia washed halfway down to Hull. People didn’t say these places were gone. They didn’t say that there were families living in caravans in service stations all along the M5, lined up in the car parks with volunteers running aid stations out of the garage forecourts. People said, To engage further with this topic, consider reading other recent works of climate fiction, like Weather by Jenny Offill and Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins, or nonfiction, like The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells or Move by Parag Khanna.
The High House - Harvard Review
It is about life during a climate-change induced apocalypse, where floods and superstorms are destroying civilisation, faster than most expected. In short, a group of four people try to survive in their High House, safe on a hill near what was once an English beach. They are well-prepared by an environmentalist who saw disaster coming, but still life is tough, precarious and psychologically almost unbearable. All these characters are well-drawn and some really came to life for me.
by Jessie Greengrass
and he did, each foot straight into each leg. She took him to the bathroom, brushed his teeth, stood over him while he washed his hands.
The High House | High House, Broad Lane Fillongley, Coventry The High House | High House, Broad Lane Fillongley, Coventry
What makes this beautifully written book horrifying is that the premise is sadly not particularly far fetched. Tiny day-to-day changes we learn to accept as the norm until one day, there are no options left. I found myself vividly imagining how my own family would cope with this situation. The whole complicated system of modernity that 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."Francesca loved her child so much, she traveled the world to warn about climate change, hoping it is not too late to stave off disaster. The boy, Pauly, is left in the care of his half-sister Caro, and he becomes more attached to her than his parents. Francesca and the children’s father renovate and outfit The High House as an escape when disaster strikes. She asks neighbors to be caretakers of the house on a hill, caring for the orchard and fields, gardens and hens. Gramps remembers the old world, and with his granddaughter Sally, are waiting at the house when Caro and Pauly are warned to flee London. It is so hard to remember, now, what it felt like to live in that space between two futures, fitting our whole lives into the gap between fear and certainty… With hands on activities, children's games and quizzes there is something for all the family. Location
The High House Swift Press | The High House
The premise is dark, but Greengrass’s lyrical prose brings glimmers of light ... Despite the devastation, this not-quite family finds small moments of love and happiness." The shortlist for the first novel award also features a postapocalyptic world. In Kate Sawyer’s The Stranding, a woman hides from a cataclysmic event inside a beached whale in New Zealand, in what judges called “an immersive end of the world story full of hope and imagination”. Caro and her younger half-brother, Pauly, arrive at the High House after her father and stepmother fall victim to a faraway climate disaster. A legacy from their climate-scientist stepmother, who predicted this future with scary accuracy, the High House is a converted summer home, set up to be refuge against the rising tides. Left with the house’s caretaker Grandy and his granddaughter, Sally, the two pairs learn to live together in the wake of tragedy, dwindling supplies and an uncertain future. That evening, Francesca came home. I don’t know where she had been – which of the many places, savaged by weather, that might have needed her expertise, and her anger – but she smelled of mould 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 fourteen the day Francesca brought Pauly home from the hospital. Father and I spent the morning cleaning the house, polishing and sweeping and dusting, until every room smelled of beeswax and vinegar. There was a bunch of sunflowers on the table in the hall, stood up in a water jug.I poured coffee from the pot, one for each of us, and one for Francesca, who came downstairs in her dressing gown, her eyes puffy and face creased, saying,
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