Costa prize 2021 shortlists highlight climate anxiety

Jessie Greengrass’s novel The High House, set in a flood-devastated Suffolk, was one of several of the nominees to focus on global heating, said judges

Jessie Greengrass’s vision of a near-future Britain drowned by an apocalyptic flood, part of the expanding genre of climate-change fiction, is among the books shortlisted for the 2021 Costa book awards.

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. “Crisis slid from distant threat to imminent probability and we tuned it out like static,” writes Greengrass, in a novel that judges described as a “powerful book that makes you consider the privilege of being saved and the reality of survival”.