The High House: Shortlisted for the Costa Best Novel Award

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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. Both a portrait of an unconventional family and of inexorable environmental tragedy, I found this extraordinarily moving." They were silent for a long time then, and I stood very still in the corridor and thought of Pauly, the way his body twitched in his sleep, the tense look he got when Francesca was there, and how it was not hard at all for me to tell if he was happy or not. 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. How will they adapt? How can humans learn to live together in a world where it’s no longer social status—acquired through heritage or wealth—that rules, but rather survival, which depends on having a piece of land you can grow your own food on, one that’s high enough and not covered by seawater?

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 Caro muses that “there is a kind of organic mercy, grown deep inside us, that makes it so much easier to care about small, close things, else how could we live? As I grew up, crisis slid from distant threat to imminent probability, and we tuned it out like static, we adjusted to each emergent normality, and did what we had always done. . . .” How does this focus on “small, close things” play out over the course of the novel, even in the midst of crisis?Sometimes, on the cusp of sleep, I can still hear them, father and Francesca. Father says, I love you, Caro, and Francesca, interrupting, calls, There isn’t time— that we are now looking at a future in which we no longer have fair warning of extreme weather events?

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.” The Costas , which were originally established in 1971, recognise the year’s “most enjoyable” books across five categories, with 934 entries this year overall. The biography shortlist pits Ed Caesar’s story of British mountaineering legend Maurice Wilson, who attempted to climb Everest alone, against Guardian theatre critic Arifa Akbar’s memoir about the death of her sister from tuberculosis, John Preston’s portrait of Robert Maxwell, and Lea Ypi’s account of coming of age in communist Albania. 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?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.) 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. At a recent talk organized by the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University College London , Jessie Greengrass said that she does not have solutions. The High House is, instead, a thought experiment. Her narrative goes much further than a dystopian novel, however, not just world-building but also analyzing the inner and interpersonal dynamics necessary for survival if human beings want to coexist. This reading group guide for The High House includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book. Then clear across the space between us, before the line went dead, I heard Francesca say, There isn’t time—

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.

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. 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 have known that it would come, the overwhelming feeling, now that it was there, was of surprise, like waking one morning to find that you had been young, and now, all at once, you weren’t. This book is set in the near future, but we don’t know how near that future is. All we know is that, given the rising sea levels brought on by climate change, any island country could be engulfed by the ocean within a matter of decades—a story that may well become reality for the next generation of readers. Greengrass writes: It didn’t occur to me that Francesca would not be safe, and I assumed that father would be too, because he was with her. Francesca was important. She would be looked after. There would be some plan, I thought, or there would be a refuge or a bunker—and then, afterward, I thought that perhaps this had been her intention all along, now that her other hopes were lost: to show how such exemptions, so long taken for granted, no longer held. None of us, now, would be let off, not even her—no power, no wealth or name or habit of ease would save us in the end—except that all the time, all through those last months and weeks, she had been building an exemption for Pauly, so that he, unlike everyone else, would be kept safe. We are all at the mercy of the weather, but not all to the same extent.

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.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. 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. 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. 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? 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."