The High House: Shortlisted for the Costa Best Novel Award

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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.) You could stop, father said. 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. Moving...Greengrass excels in her account of this makeshift family—the sweet but fading Grandy, the two women who often see themselves as rivals, and the curious, growing, bird-crazy Pauly—and their attempts to live on and with and through a land that is increasingly inhospitable...[A] poignant, impressive contribution to an ever growing genre, the fiction of climate catastrophe.” Greengrass is excellent on the complex currents that can develop between people who live in close proximity: the way Pauly’s birth subtly reconfigures Caro’s relationship with her father and stepmother; Sal’s dislike of Caro, with her physical fragility and obvious grief. The fact that both women are orphans is not a source of common feeling but a trigger for judgment, or even jealousy. When Sal observes that the newly arrived Caro and Pauly “seem happy now, anyway”, her grandfather’s response conveys a great deal with very few words: 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.

This postapocalyptic, introspective drama is all about the love of family, isolation, hopelessness, and the will to go on. Readers will be asking the question, is it better to remember the life you had before and all that’s been lost, or to start fresh, only knowing this new existence? This novel is perfect for those who enjoy beautifully written, thought-provoking stories." 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 vicar comes and goes in the story, and Pauly, Grandy, Sally, and Caro have varying responses to the ideas of God and faith. Discuss how each of them understands the idea of God, particularly as they experience tragedy. How do they each respond to the vicar, and for what reasons do they visit the church?We made our way across the busy concourse, found the platform, found the train. Found seats. Sat down. What will you do? father asked me again, and Francesca said, That’s a pretty stupid question, under the circumstances. And this is what the titular high house is: an eventual refuge for Pauly and Caro, as well as caretakers Sally and her grandfather, Grandy, who are from the nearby village and are hired by Francesca to take care of the high house after Grandy suffers a broken hip and Sally leaves college to care for him. Lush ... Greengrass explores what it is like to grow up amid an escalating catastrophe and what remains after so much is swept away.”

Timely and terrifying second novel ... 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.”The woman shrugged, barely looking up, and gave me a number, different to the one I had found in the station, but when I called it, although it rang and rang, no one answered.

but watching her I thought that it was not defeat at all. 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. 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. And now at times it is almost an island again.Greengrass is a thoughtful writer and The High House is full of elegant, resonant sentences about human fallibility, complacency, selfishness and our unquenchable capacity for love." Francesca is a world-renowned scientist who travels the globe to chronicle the effects of the climate crisis, while pitching in to rescue myriad victims on the brink. But when she becomes pregnant, she grapples with a feeling she’s never known before: the fierce desire to shield her child, even as she recognizes that humanity is doomed. After Paul is born, Francesca outfits her family’s large home with a toolkit for survival, from tins of food to medicine for all occasions to apparel in every imaginable size; Francesca is clearly planning to help her son survive as along as possible with or without her. Meanwhile, Sally had already known about Francesca through her involvement in an ecological society at her university when she meets her in person through Grandy. Francesca listens closely to Grandy’s stories of the slow but inexorable destruction of the region, storm by storm—but of course, the devastation isn’t only local; news comes from around the world of earthquakes, fire, flood, and drought. Still, it’s not enough to galvanize anyone into change: “Each time people gave money, for a while, and then there was something else, and the last thing was forgotten by all except those who, presumably, still lived inside it.” Sally’s realization that humans are all in this together comes only after they’re caught up in it: “We had been watching people drown for years, and the only difference was that before they had always been a long way off from us … disaster would only come when it had our own faces on it—and now, here it was.”

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, 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?

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and I walked down the road to where Pauly was waiting, standing at the gate in his coat and hat and mittens. 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. Francesca, a climate scientist and environmental activist, mother to Pauly, and stepmother to Caro, has been trying in vain to get the world to listen. She knows what is coming and is planning for it; while no one is listening to her warnings, at least not closely enough to take action, she can, at least, take the necessary steps to save her family. 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. It was five hours behind where he and Francesca were, on the east coast of the US, and so it must have been early afternoon for him, but I thought he sounded tired. Perhaps they had been up all night, sat round a table in a conference centre trying yet again to force understanding where it wasn’t welcome. I said, Dad! and heard him sigh.