He sat on my lap and followed the story page by page, and when we found the picture of the wolf, Pauly squealed, delighted as I knew he would be, and pointed at the animal’s stretched and grinning mouth.

The High House by Jessie Greengrass | Waterstones The High House by Jessie Greengrass | Waterstones

Greengrass’s The High House follows Caro and her little brother Pauly as they try to survive in a flooded Suffolk, in a refuge created by Caro’s climate scientist stepmother. It seemed, at times, as though it were a magic trick done skillfully, so swift and smooth, and I was afraid in case, were I to learn the way that happiness was palmed, the trick would cease to work. The high house belonged to Francesca’s uncle first, but the uncle died not long after she and my father met. 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? Father made dinner and opened a bottle of wine so that a glass was poured, ready, when she came back down, blinking in the light.

The vicar comes and goes in the story, and Pauly, Grandy, Sally, and Caro have varying responses to the ideas of God and faith. All these things were forfeit, and, along with them, the sense we’d always had that, whatever happened, we would be all right. Unlike other postapocalyptic tales, plot is secondary to the emotional weight borne by the characters who know the end is coming, and to the harrowing glimpses of the future. And all the while, outside, the thing that only she could look at straight: the early springs and too-long summers, the sudden, unpredictable winters that came from nowhere and brought floods or ice or wind, or didn’t come, so that there was only day after day of sticky dampness and the leaves rotting on the trees and the birds still singing in December, nesting, until the snow came at last and, having overlooked migration, they froze on the branches, and they died. We did these things not out of ignorance, nor through thoughtlessness, but only because there seemed nothing else to do—and we did them as well because they were a kind of fine-grained incantation, made in flesh and time.

The High House by Jessie Greengrass review - The Guardian

I sat at the bottom of the stairs, watching the door, waiting at the center of all the mess-less emptiness of our house, and I might have felt unwanted then. When I was tired of being by myself, I came in from the garden and trailed after him, nagging to be taken somewhere. Now she was making bread, and when she heard me she came running out through the open kitchen doors, wiping her hands on her jeans, leaving two white trails of flour. Not only admiration for what I had read, but fear, which I had swallowed down, one calm and often beautiful sentence after another. I made him cups of tea and cooked him pasta with tomato sauce whenever he came home, and I said that of course things would be fine—but to myself I thought that perhaps they would not be fine.The High House was one of several books submitted for the novel prize to tackle environmental themes, said judge and author Jessie Burton, describing books that were “preoccupied with rising waters, the world heating up, the decimation of natural wildlife and the effects of humans on the land”. The birth had been difficult, Father told me, when he came back from the hospital in the middle of the night for a change of clothes. In the afternoon father picked him up, dropping by on his way home from the university, or if father stayed late then I would go. but it was nearly midnight before at last he fell asleep, exhausted, half in and half out of the doorway. When the time came to go back to our home in the city it was a relief, because there our lives had formed around us.