The High House by Jessie Greengrass

In this powerful, highly anticipated novel from an award-winning author, four people attempt to make a home in the midst of environmental disaster.

Perched on a sloping hill, set away from a small town by the sea, the High House has a tide pool and a mill, a vegetable garden, and, most importantly, a barn full of supplies. Caro, Pauly, Sally, and Grandy are safe, so far, from the rising water that threatens to destroy the town and that has, perhaps, already destroyed everything else. But for how long?

Caro and her younger half-brother, Pauly, arrive at the High House after her father and stepmother fall victim to a faraway climate disaster—but not before they call and urge Caro to leave London. In their new home, a converted summer house cared for by Grandy and his granddaughter, Sally, the two pairs learn to live together. Yet there are limits to their safety, limits to the supplies, limits to what Grandy—the former village caretaker, a man who knows how to do everything—can teach them as his health fails.

A searing novel that takes on parenthood, sacrifice, love, and survival under the threat of extinction, The High House is a stunning, emotionally precise novel about what can be salvaged at the end of the world.

I think we tend to believe that, even at the end of everything, humans would survive, mostly with grace and courage. But what if that’s not the case? What if our end comes, not with a bang, but with a whimper?

The four main characters, the young Pauly, his half-sister, Caro, Sally and her grandfather, Grandy, find themselves sheltering in High House after things start to seriously fall apart everywhere else. Pauly’s mother, Francesca, an environmentalist who had tried to warn the world of what was to come, has left him a house that has been stocked as well as she could manage. There is food and shelter, and a garden and mill to create more, but nothing is forever, and as the supplies dwindle, the survivors are left to wonder just how long they’ll survive.

The book jumps between time and characters, but the dawning horror of what is coming is always there. And as that horror overtakes the reader, we see what may well be our own future. This is a harrowing novel, but one well worth reading.




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The High House by Jessie Greengrass