The High House

Jessie Greengrass’s The High House is a quietly devastating climate novel set in a near-future Britain ravaged by rising seas. Focusing on a small group of characters sheltering in a coastal home, Greengrass examines how catastrophe reshapes responsibility, love, and sacrifice. Her writing is elegant and restrained, capturing the unsettling calm that precedes — and follows — disaster. Rather than sensationalism, the novel offers intimacy: the slow erosion of certainty, the burden of care, and the guilt of those who saw the crisis coming. It is haunting, compassionate, and deeply attuned to environmental politics.