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I'm looking for a novel about our changing climate!

Responding to the climate crisis

Art both reflects and shapes the world around us, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that the defining literary genre of the current era is climate fiction (or cli-fi), fiction that deals with climate change and global warming. These books may be either set in the dismal facts of the present or speculate on the shape of the near future. They may be apocalyptic. They may be scientific. They may attempt to educate, to be a call for attention or to action, and they are often fervent and impassioned.

· California has run out of water in the YA novel Dry, by Neal Schusterman, in which society disintegrates, water zombies stalk the streets, and survivalists come into their own.

· When global warming has rendered most of the world’s cities uninhabitable, a team of scientists research what might come next in J G Ballard’s classic 1962 novel The Drowned World.

· It’s Australia’s drought which is the backdrop for Jane Harper’s crime novel The Dry, in which a small farming community is put under enormous pressure by the stresses of trying to farm without water.

· Ash fills the lungs of the characters of Richard Flanagan’s The Living Sea of Waking Dreams as Australia burns, its wildlife dies, and cruise ships pollute its waters, while three siblings cope with the prolonged death of their mother.

· Peter Høeg, the author of Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, presents a formidable female scientist in The Susan Effect, who comes up against a conspiracy to save a privileged few from the imminent effects of climate change.

· The first novel in the dystopian MaadAddam trilogy by Margaret Atwood (the daughter of a biologist) is Oryx and Crake, which imagines a future world devastated by the effects of technological innovations in biological science.

· A woman gives birth as London is submerged by floodwaters in Megan Hunter’s debut novel, The End We Start From, and just days later she must flee with her baby in search of safety.

· Octavia Butler imagines 2025 in Parable of the Sower (published in 1993), when global warming, pollution and racial tension have led to a world of cruelty and hunger; Lauren hopes to found a visionary enclave based on a philosophy/religion called Earthseed.

· The impact of climate change on the migratory habits of monarch butterflies is the backdrop to a family drama in Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver.

·A tsunami sends a massive trash vortex crashing onto the coast of Taiwan in The Man with The Compound Eyes by Wu Ming-Yi, with wide-ranging effects for environmentalists as well as Taiwan’s indigenous peoples.