The High House: Shortlisted for the Costa Best Novel Award

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What will you do? father asked me again, and Francesca said, That’s a pretty stupid question, under the circumstances. The High House is on a bluff and survived the devasting flood in its past. Would it hold up against what Francesca sees in store for the future? Believing that “it is a question of preparedness” she probes Grandy Once you’ve finished the novel, talk about your own perceptions of climate disaster. Did this novel change your feelings about the environmental crisis? How so?

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.” 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, schools, what had been hills rising now as islands. In York, the river had burst its banks and the city center was gone, walls that 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 parking lots with volunteers running aid stations out of the garage forecourts. People said,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, Next morning, after the storm had moved away, we turned on the television again and saw satellite pictures of the place where the island had been, and where there was nothing now but bare earth and a patch of ocean scummy with debris. The people who had lived there were in temporary shelters, we were told, on the nearest major landmass, a thousand miles away from where, a week earlier, they had been at home. It was unclear how many had chosen to stay. 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.

Caro, who is fourteen when Pauly is born, feels that he makes their family whole: “As a three we were unbalanced, but the baby’s weight had evened out the scales.” Still, the family splinters as Francesca, when she is not traveling to speak about the climate, spends more time at the high house (along with Caro and Pauly’s father, who feels like a very minor character in the novel), preparing for what’s to come, outfitting it with compostable toilets, a two-hundred-year generator, a garden, and loads of supplies, including shoes and clothing for Pauly to grow into, a boat which they will not use until the waterline irreversibly shifts—and morphine. Because Francesca does not intend to cease her work after her son is born, her shelter must include trusted others who can look after him when she can’t. Enter Grandy and Sally (a grandfather and his university student granddaughter), who have already suffered losses only hinted at in the novel.I stayed for a long time, staring at them—the boxes of felt-tip pens, the reams of paper, chalks, playing cards, boxes of Lego—and in the silent barn I felt love come off the shelves like heat. I felt Francesca, planning, all through the autumn and the winter, while I thought she had abandoned us. The story is told by three young people: Caro, her half-brother Pauly, and Sally. Caro becomes her brother’s caretaker by default, for Pauly’s mother, Francesca, and Caro’s father are scientists on a mission to warn the world about the impending climate catastrophe. They travel the world visiting conferences, and this is how they meet their death in America in a storm on the West Coast.

and for a moment there was a gap in her fury, and she looked neither fierce nor righteous but only rather sad—as though she could see already how far she had failed, and wished only that the end would come, and let us all out. 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.” Range oven and gas hob, microwave, fridge, freezer and dishwasher and a four oven Aga in kitchen/dining room An intimate, elegiac drama of a not-quite family finding a way to be together. Greengrass steeps us deeply in her wild, watery setting ... its prophetic vision fixes the attention."You think you have time. And then, all at once, you don’t.” So writes Jessie Greengrass in her disturbing, beautiful new novel, The High House, which was shortlisted for the 2021 Costa Novel Award and the 2022 Encore Award of The Royal Society of Literature, and the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. (The winner of the Orwell Prize, Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, was recently announced.)