What To Read? The Climate Fiction Prize

A guest blog this week, as Paula van Eenennaam writes about the books on the Climate Fiction Prize, winner announced later tonight. You can follow Paula's brilliant book reviews and musings on her Substack, Odd Types.

It is a truth (kind of) universally acknowledged, that climate change is one of the most powerful forces currently shaping our daily lives, and it was about damn time it received its own literary prize. In case you missed their inaugural run last year, allow me to introduce you to the Climate Fiction Prize, now on its second year in operation.

‘For societies to fully grasp the climate change threat and to embrace its solutions, we need better stories,’ the prize asserts, echoing the call of many acclaimed writers and thinkers before for new modes of storytelling that resolve the so-called crisis of imagination when it comes to the depiction of climate change in literature.

As we near the announcement of the winner, I would love the highlight the sheer variety of stories and approaches that have come out of this year’s shortlist. From San Francisco, to Ukraine, Tasmania, China and Delhi, reading the shortlist has been a globe-trotting adventure of epic proportions. The judges have done a tremendous job of curating a shortlist of books that span a bevy of styles, themes, and forms, and which reveal how climate change operates in different contexts and under different conditions, as well as the myriads of human responses to the challenges it poses.

Whether you’re into futuristic dystopia, state-of-the-nation novels, quiet and introspective reads, or a daring experimental ride, I guarantee there’s a title in here for you.

Awake in the Floating City by Susanna Kwan

In a future waterlogged San Francisco, Bo, a forty-year-old artist, is mourning the community she’s lost to the floods. Emotionally unable to leave the city she’s called home her entire life, she takes up a job caring for Mia, a 130-year-old ‘supercentenarian’ long abandoned by her own family. Inspired by her stories of the past century, Bo learns how to find her way back to her abandoned artistic practice as a way to make sense of the disappearing world around her and honour the life of this new unexpected friend. Awake in the Floating City is a slow-moving ode to the importance of community and care-taking, as well as the transformative power of art in times of crisis. Make sure to bring out the tissues for this one!

Endling by Maria Reva

Undoubtably a crowd favourite and media darling, Endling has been attracting attention since it was longlisted for the Booker Prize last year—and for good reason! What starts off as an absurd and comical story about a scientist dedicated to preserving snail species in her mobile lab and a wild stunt to bring down the romance tour industry in Ukraine, quickly turns into a thought-provoking metafictional reckoning with the war that ponders on the ethics of writing about conflict and violence. An ambitious and daring work of literary fiction that makes record of a snail and a country under the threat of extinction. I would put my money on this one to take home the prize!

The Tiger’s Share by Keshava Guha

Tara, a high-achieving Delhi lawyer, is summoned alongside her brother into a family meeting organised by their retired father to discuss the kind of legacy he would like to leave behind. What he reveals launches a complex network of tensions that threatens to tear the

family apart. The Tiger’s Share is both a family saga of inheritance and a state-of-the-nation novel that paints a vibrant portrait of contemporary Delhi society against the backdrop of societal and ecological collapse. It’s fun, it’s shocking, and, in my opinion, a must-read for fans of Zadie Smith’s early maximalism and social satire.

HUM by Helen Phillips

In a sweltering concrete city where super-intelligent AI robots have taken over the workforce, May is left desperate and adrift when her job training AI systems becomes obsolete. In a bid to keep her family afloat, she undergoes an experimental procedure for quick cash. Looking for a much-needed break from technology and life’s daily pressures, she uses the money from the operation to treat her family to a stay at the idyllic Botanical Gardens. But May’s fragile sense of optimism comes to an end when her children wander off, triggering a chain of events that threaten the family unit. By turns tragic, comic and deeply unsettling, HUM offers a chilling glimpse into a future that feels alarmingly near and brings into question the false promises of progress and the human cost of technological advancement.

Dusk by Robbie Arnott

Originally imported from South America as an ill-conceived experiment to curb down deer population, the eponymous puma, Dusk, has now moved on to sheep and terrorising the lives of shepherds in rural Tasmania. Twin siblings Iris and Floyd join the hunt for Dusk in need of the bounty money to escape their precarious lives as outcasts. The novel moves away from stereotypical hunting narratives to expose the violence in the human fight for dominance over the natural world. Full of lush description of the Tasmanian highlands, Dusk is the perfect read if you’re looking for a page-turning adventure about survival, redemption and the bonds that tie us to land and one another.

The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien

Lina spends her childhood in a migrant centre called ‘the Sea’ which houses a wide range of refugees from across the world rerouting them to safe harbour. Because of her father’s illness, however, Lina is forced to remain in the centre for years in an unresolved state of limbo whilst watching people she meets come and go. To pass the time, she revisits the stories of three historical characters in a series of biographical books for children called The Great Lives of Voyagers. Their lives merge with hers to tell a story about migration, identity and belonging. The Book of Records is a deeply philosophical inquiry into the nature of the self in a state of flux and how our experiences echo through space and time. I personally found this to be the weaker of the bunch, but it will appeal to those looking for a more philosophical, contemplative read.

Thanks Paula. You can browse and shop the climate fiction longlisted reads here at Bookbag.