Greengrass is the recipient of a Somerset Maugham Award and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize for her debut collection, An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, which shares with The High House a deep alarm about environmental trauma. Her first novel, 2018’s Sight, was shortlisted for several awards, including the 2018 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Greengrass is working the same terrain others writers have mined, but The High House stands out for our investment in its characters’ fates. An intimate, elegiac drama of a not-quite family finding a way to be together. Greengrass steeps us deeply in her wild, watery setting ... its prophetic vision fixes the attention." The vicar comes and goes in the story, and Pauly, Grandy, Sally, and Caro have varying responses to the ideas of God and faith. Discuss how each of them understands the idea of God, particularly as they experience tragedy. How do they each respond to the vicar, and for what reasons do they visit the church? Honor Arundel was a novelist for children and young adults, critic, playwright, poet, editor, and journalist. She is right that what might come now will not be like what has gone before, but I am an old man, and I have seen worlds end myself. I have seen the end of this village for a start.

Range oven and gas hob, microwave, fridge, freezer and dishwasher and a four oven Aga in kitchen/dining room I poured coffee from the pot, one for each of us, and one for Francesca, who came downstairs in her dressing gown, her eyes puffy and face creased, saying, At the High House, Caro and Pauly settle in with Grandy, the former village caretaker, and his granddaughter Sally, who Francesca entrusted to care for the house. Once a summer home, it has been transformed into an environmentalist’s bunker, with a generator and a barn full of supplies. As floods threaten the village and the coast, the four of them eke out a life, working to adapt to the changing seasons, the disastrous news, and the crushing fear of the crises still ahead. A tender and urgent novel about a found family, The High House is an intimate, emotionally precise exploration of what can be salvaged, and what makes life worth living—even at the end of the world.By the time Caro turns eighteen, she has left school and has no plans; she watches as her life stretches “empty ahead,” as hills become islands and city centers drown. Daffodils appear in the park in December; February brings hot summer days. Bees, birds, and grasshoppers are nowhere to be heard. If there’s no point. We could stay together, for a while at least. Caro is unhappy. Paul too, probably, although I agree it’s harder to tell.

Timely and terrifying … The High House stands out for our investment in its characters’ fates … Hope survives even a worst-case scenario, it seems. And yet, what remains with the reader is this: Let’s not let things get to that point.” He sounded tired. It was five hours behind where he and Francesca were, on the East Coast of the US, so it could only have been early afternoon, but perhaps they had been up all night, sitting round a table in a conference center trying yet again to force understanding where it wasn’t welcomed. I said, Moving…Greengrass excels in her account of this makeshift family—the sweet but fading Grandy, the two women who often see themselves as rivals, and the curious, growing, bird-crazy Pauly—and their attempts to live on and with and through a land that is increasingly inhospitable…[A] poignant, impressive contribution to an ever growing genre, the fiction of climate catastrophe." - KirkusPauly is so young when disaster strikes that much of his understanding of reality is grounded in his life in the High House; he has “forgotten an entire world,” he reflects. Do you think this gives him a greater capacity for happiness or contentedness than the others? Why or why not? Sally thrives in this pastoral setup, learning everything Grandy can teach her. She grows garlic from seed, cans fruits and vegetables, hunts and fishes. He mentors her in mending and fixing essentials as the years pass and their community of neighbors dwindles. Sally is old enough to remember “the beginning of things, when we were still uncertain, and it was still possible to believe that nothing whatever was wrong, barring an unusual run of hot Julys and January storms.”

He liked to play hide-and-seek, but could never get the hang of staying hidden and would leap out as soon as I came into a room, shouting, Francesca is a world-renowned scientist who travels the globe to chronicle the effects of the climate crisis, while pitching in to rescue myriad victims on the brink. But when she becomes pregnant, she grapples with a feeling she’s never known before: the fierce desire to shield her child, even as she recognizes that humanity is doomed. After Paul is born, Francesca outfits her family’s large home with a toolkit for survival, from tins of food to medicine for all occasions to apparel in every imaginable size; Francesca is clearly planning to help her son survive as along as possible with or without her. Moving...Greengrass excels in her account of this makeshift family—the sweet but fading Grandy, the two women who often see themselves as rivals, and the curious, growing, bird-crazy Pauly—and their attempts to live on and with and through a land that is increasingly inhospitable...[A] poignant, impressive contribution to an ever growing genre, the fiction of climate catastrophe.”

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Greengrass said she wanted to explore the “disconnect” between our knowledge of the impending disaster of the climate crisis, and our inability to act on it – “that kind of weird space where you can watch something happening that’s terrible, and know that it’s happening, and be afraid of it happening, but still just get on with all of the ordinary things of life”. It used to be that Pauly needed me, and so I looked after him. I thought it was as simple as a question and its answer, and didn’t think about the ways that his small person might be an answer to something in its turn. Now things are the other way about. On bad days, when I can’t sit still, when my head aches and I want to sleep but sleep won’t come, when my longing for father and for Francesca is so great that I can hardly stand it, then I follow Pauly around. I shadow him. I know he finds it hard. I know that I should pull myself together. he asked, and I shrugged one shoulder up and slid my eyes away. There had been daffodils in the park at Christmas. The coast path had been redrawn at six different places over the last three years. I heard Francesca’s hissed intake of breath. I heard her pause, turn, walk away, and I felt a sudden spasm of guilt. How warm Pauly was in my lap, how comfortable, how soft, and how it must have hurt Francesca then to be in the next room, alone, and to have the truth confirmed: it wasn’t that Pauly didn’t talk at all, but only that he didn’t talk to her. I loved the tide pool, then. Even now, when we are so reliant on it, I regret the loss of its wildness, the way it was before Francesca restored the mill, when reeds grew down close around its edges and small creatures rustled in and out of them, going about their secret business. I loved how still it was, the way the water rose and fell, creeping rippleless up the banks, the way its surface shone when sunlight caught it—but father was afraid of me falling in, or getting caught in the mud, so I wasn’t allowed to go near it by myself.