14 books
Megha Majumdar
It’s set in Kolkata, India, a few decades out, under flood and heat and a food shortage that has markets selling seaweed and synthetic fish. Ma runs a shelter, cares for her elderly father and her two-year-old daughter, and has…
Franziska Gänsler
Iris runs a hotel in Bad Heim, a German spa town six hours from Berlin that used to be a place people came to. Now the fires burn across the river every summer, the smoke never clears, people wear masks…
Emily St. John Mandel
Los Angeles, 2031, the first spring after the United States comes apart. Peacekeepers are pulling out, the curfew just lifted, the jacarandas are blooming, and everybody in the city is going to a party. Ari Waker walks across Silver Lake…
Claire Vaye Watkins
The Southwest has dried out and been evacuated, and a dune sea called the Amargosa is moving east across California, burying towns. Luz, a former poster child for the drought-relief effort, and Ray, an ex-soldier, are squatting in an abandoned…
Charlotte McConaghy
Franny Stone talks her way onto a fishing boat in Greenland by promising the crew that the Arctic terns she has tagged will lead them to the last fish in a mostly emptied ocean. The birds are making what may…
Nathaniel Rich
Mitchell Zukor is a young math genius hired by a Manhattan firm called FutureWorld that sells corporations worst-case scenarios — for a fee, they calculate your catastrophic exposure and indemnify you against being sued for not foreseeing it. Mitchell is…
Kim Stanley Robinson
It opens with a heat wave in Uttar Pradesh that kills twenty million people in a week, and the rest of the book is the world reacting. A UN agency is set up in Zurich to represent people who aren’t…
Diane Cook
Many dream of the camping trip that never ends. Surely our best selves are found in nature, right? In Diane Cook’s novel The New Wilderness, a mother saves her daughter from pollution-induced asthma by moving to the Wilderness State, an…
John Lanchester
Sea level went, and Britain has ringed the entire island in concrete. Every citizen serves two years as a Defender on the wall, twelve-hour shifts staring at cold water, and the rule is simple: If Others get past you, you…
Paolo Bacigalupi
The Colorado River has been cut down to nothing and the states have gone to war over what’s left, legally and otherwise. Nevada has water knives — Angel Velasquez is one — men who show up with a court order…
Paolo Bacigalupi
Oil is gone, the seas came up, and the world runs on calories — which means the agribusiness companies that own the seed patents own everything. Thailand has held out, protected by seawalls, a ruthless Environment Ministry, and a hidden…
Meg Little Reilly
Ash and Pia leave Brooklyn for rural Vermont wanting a simpler life, and then the forecasts start describing a superstorm months out — big enough that the government begins issuing guidance and the town begins picking sides. Pia throws herself…
Ian McEwan
The year is 2119, most of Britain is under water and reduced to an archipelago, and an academic named Thomas Metcalfe has built his career on a lost poem — read aloud once at a dinner party in 2014, never…
Charlotte McConaghy
Set on a fictional and very, very remote island at the bottom of the world, Charlotte McConaghy’s third novel brings new meaning to Southern gothic: There are dark and stormy nights, melodrama, and a ruddy lighthouse keeper, but whales and…
