The High House: Shortlisted for the Costa Best Novel Award

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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.

The High House: Shortlisted for the Costa Best Novel Award The High House: Shortlisted for the Costa Best Novel Award

Now shortlisted for the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and 2022 RSL Encore Prize for Second Novels (having previously been shortlisted for the 2021 Costa Novel Prize and The High House also takes on parenthood, though none of the four central characters are parents themselves. Grandy, as Sally’s grandfather, and Caro, as Pauly’s sister, both have parental roles, and all three adults are engaged in raising Pauly. The High House, which sustains all of them, exists only because of Francesca’s love for her child. How do characters pass down knowledge? Does raising Pauly mean they must keep going, despite it all? When he is an adult, what motivation do they have left? Built in around 1595 for the wealthy Dorrington family, the ornate timber framed building is reputed to be the largest surviving timber framed town house in England from the Tudor period.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." As Caro says: “There is a kind of organic mercy, grown deep inside us, which makes it so much easier to care about small, close things, else how could we live? The whole complicated system of modernity which 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. Somehow, while we had all been busy, while we had been doing those small things which added up to living, the future had slipped into the present – and, despite the fact that we had known that it would come, the overwhelming feeling, now that it was here, was of surprise, like waking up one morning to find that you had been young, and now, all at once, you weren’t. The Stranding is joined on the debut shortlist by Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Open Water, which judges called a “nuanced portrayal of the realities of race today”, poet AK Blakemore’s The Manningtree Witches, set in Essex in 1643 as a puritanical fervour grips the nation, and Emily Itami’s Fault Lines, in which Mizuki, lonely in spite of her family, falls for Kiyoshi and begins an affair.

The High House | Book by Jessie Greengrass | Official The High House | Book by Jessie Greengrass | Official

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: Bookending my read of this book was another news article, this one about how Lake Powell, source of electricity for much of the SW US, may go dry as early as next summer. Our future gets scarier every day. Thank god we have books to retreat to. We followed the river out toward the sea, first through the outskirts of the town, past the new-built housing estates and the playgrounds, the primary school, the supermarket with its parking lot, the drive-through fast-food restaurant and the petrol station. Pauly walked beside me, holding my hand. Yes, Francesca replied, I am. I think I am. We always knew a tipping point would come. It’s a surprise, really, that it’s taken so long.Both a portrait of an unconventional family and of inexorable environmental tragedy, I found this extraordinarily moving." And this book is effectively a Cli-Fi book, one which will I think be interesting for fans of Jenny Offil’s “Weather” while being very different in style from that to. 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. This book is one of the first published by Swift Press, a new independent publishing company launched in 2020 and part of the Independent Alliance.

The High House Swift Press | The High House

Climate scientist Francesca anticipated the increased erratic weather patterns, melting glaciers, and severe flooding that would cause worldwide disasters. "The High House" takes us to a home on a high hill in Suffolk surrounded by gardens, a barn full of supplies, and a small mill and generator powered by water. Francesca set up this home for her toddler son and her teenage stepdaughter. She also arranged to have an old caretaker/handyman and his granddaughter move in as caretakers of the home. The last message from Francesca and her husband directed the two children to travel to the High House to shelter safely. As scientists we are used to remaining in one place. We tell ourselves that it is our job only to present the evidence—but such neutrality has become a fantasy. The time for it is past.

When the artist left, a group of students from a nearby agricultural college moved in, and Francesca let them pay a nominal rent in exchange for renovating the garden.