The High House: Shortlisted for the Costa Best Novel Award

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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, We are delighted to celebrate these 20 brilliant books as we mark a milestone 50th anniversary year,” said Jill McDonald, chief executive of prize sponsor Costa Coffee. “There’s so much here for readers to explore, enjoy, recommend and share.” 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.

Off-road parking for 4 cars and further parking in the village(please note if bringing 4 cars the 4th spot is small and will only accommodate a smaller car) 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. 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." - Kirkus 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. A book suffused with the joy and fulfilment of raising a child... The High House stands out." - The Guardian (UK)

by Jessie Greengrass

I said, more sharply than I meant because I felt the woman’s judgment on me, but it wasn’t Pauly’s fault that he was bored, and at once I was ashamed. Greengrass is the recipient of a Somerset Maugham Award and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize for her debut collection, An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, which shares with The High House a deep alarm about environmental trauma. Her first novel, 2018’s Sight, was shortlisted for several awards, including the 2018 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Greengrass is working the same terrain others writers have mined, but The High House stands out for our investment in its characters’ fates.

he asked, and I shrugged one shoulder up and slid my eyes away. There had been daffodils in the park at Christmas. The coast path had been redrawn at six different places over the last three years. 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.” By the time Caro turns eighteen, she has left school and has no plans; she watches as her life stretches “empty ahead,” as hills become islands and city centers drown. Daffodils appear in the park in December; February brings hot summer days. Bees, birds, and grasshoppers are nowhere to be heard.

Table of Contents

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. There are some beautiful lines about grief, such as Caro admitting that thinking of her late father “was unbearable. I could feel the shape of the empty space his hands had left behind”.