Climate Fiction 26

In the distant highlands, a puma named Dusk is killing shepherds. Down in the lowlands, twins Iris and Floyd are out of work, money and friends. When they hear that a bounty has been placed on Dusk, they reluctantly decide to join the hunt. As they journey up into this wild, haunted country, they discover there's far more to the land and people of the highlands than they imagined. And as they close in on their prey, they're forced to reckon with conflicts both ancient and deeply personal. From the critically acclaimed and award-winning author of The Rain Heron, Dusk is a masterful, mythical tale of loss, redemption, and survival. For fans of North Woods and The Vaster Wilds, Dusk is a propulsive, moody, and atmospheric take on the Western. Endorsements A New Yorker best book of 2025 so far. “Arnott has an astonishing facility with language, and his prose imbues the Tasmanian wilderness with an extraordinary, immanent beauty... Starkly beautiful and deeply felt.” — James Bradley, The Guardian "This is a propulsive novel of survival and betrayal, enriched by arresting depictions of nature." — The Economist "Arresting... Readers will be utterly captivated by this atmospheric tale of danger and survival." — Publishers Weekly, starred review

In late twenty-first century Australia, Tao-Yi and her partner Navin spend most of their time inside a hyper-immersive, hyper-consumerist virtual reality called Gaia. They log on, go to work, socialise, and even eat in this digital utopia. Meanwhile their aging bodies lie suspended in pods inside cramped apartments. Across the city, in the abandoned ‘real’ world, Tao-Yi’s mother remains stubbornly offline, preferring instead to indulge in memories of her life in Malaysia.When a new technology is developed to permanently upload a human brain to Gaia, Tao-Yi must decide what is most important: a digital future, or an authentic past.Never Let Me Go meets Black Mirror, with a dash of Murakami surrealism thrown in; this is speculative literary fiction at its best.

The fiercest wars are fought between siblings.Tara, a successful Delhi lawyer, is everything her younger brother isn't: dedicated, independent, thriving. When their beloved father retires, he summons them to a meeting. But what he has to say threatens to tear the family apart.Tara's friend Lila has it all: a great job, a lovely home, a beautiful family. But when Lila's father dies unexpectedly, her brother wastes no time in claiming what he thinks is his.Together, Tara and Lila are forced to confront the challenge that their ambition poses to patriarchal Delhi society. Set against a backdrop of ecological collapse and political unrest, The Tiger's Share is both a family and a state-of-the-nation novel unlike anything else in contemporary Indian fiction.

Helm is a ferocious, mischievous wind - a subject of folklore and awe, who has blasted the sublime landscape of the Eden Valley since the very dawn of time.Through the stories of those who have obsessed over this phenomenon, Helm's extraordinary history is formed: the Neolithic tribe who tried to placate Helm, the Dark Age wizard priest who wanted to banish Helm, the Victorian steam engineer who attempted to capture Helm - and the farmer's daughter who loved Helm. But now Dr Selima Sutar, surrounded by infinite clouds and measuring instruments in her observation hut, fears human pollution is killing Helm.Rich, wild and vital, Helm is the story of a unique life force, and of a relationship: between nature and people, neither of whom can weather life without the other.

The Brookes are gathering in their eighteenth-century ancestral home—twenty bedrooms of carved Sussex sandstone—to bury their patriarch, Philip. Father, grandfather, husband, landowner, one-time hippy, long-time philanderer, Philip was the blinding sun around which the family has orbited their entire lives.Eldest daughter Frannie, inheritor of a thousand acres of English countryside, mother to a daughter whose future she fears for, dreams of rewilding and returning the estate to a last line of defense against the coming climate catastrophe. Her brother Milo envisages a treetop haven for the super-rich where, under the influence of psychedelic drugs, a new ruling class will be reborn to create a better world. Each believes their father has given them his blessing and is set on a collision course with the other.Isa, Philip’s estranged youngest child, only hopes to reconnect with her childhood love who still lives on the estate, to discover if her feelings for him are creating the fault lines in her marriage. Grace, bruised and diminished after fifty years in a loveless marriage, is at a crossroads, wondering whether she may finally have the strength to choose between freedom and duty. And then there is Clara, who arrives from America, shrouded in secrets and bearing a truth that will fracture the dreams on which they’ve built their lives.Beautifully layered and utterly compelling, Anna Hope’s multigenerational saga is a bold, brilliant, and deeply contemporary examination of family dynamics, colonial legacies, and class, set against the backdrop of the climate crisis.

Bo knows she should go. Years of rain have drowned the city and almost everyone else has fled. Her mother was carried away in a storm surge and ever since, Bo has been alone. She is stalled: an artist unable to make art, a daughter unable to give up the hope that her mother may still be alive. Half-heartedly, she allows her cousin to plan for her escape—but as the departure day approaches, she finds a note slipped under her door from Mia, an elderly woman who lives in her building and wants to hire Bo to be her caregiver. Suddenly, Bo has a reason to stay.Mia can be prickly, and yet still she and Bo forge a connection deeper than any Bo has had with a client. Mia shares stories of her life that pull Bo back toward art, toward the practice she thought she’d abandoned. Listening to Mia, allowing her memories to become entangled with Bo’s own, she’s struck by how much history will be lost as the city gives way to water. Then Mia’s health turns, and Bo determines to honor their disappearing world and this woman who’s brought her back to it, a project that teaches her the lessons that matter most: how to care, how to be present, how to commemorate a life and a place, soon to be lost forever.An utterly transporting debut novel about the unexpected relationship between an artist and the 130-year-old woman she cares for—two of the last people living in a flooded San Francisco of the future, the home neither is ready to leave.Endorsements“An astonishing work of art… This is the kind of book that changes you, that leaves you seeing more vividly, and living more fully, in its wake.” — Rachel Khong, author of Real Americans.

Corporations fall, gangsters are killed, but no one messes with the Couriers Guild.When Armand Pierce first became a courier ten years ago, he had an attaché case connected to a titanium cuff grafted into the bones of his wrist, and learned that delivery is everything. He can run, fight—kill, if he needs to—but the package gets where it's going. It's the Guild's guarantee, and since the internet went down in the Cyber Wars, all business, legitimate or otherwise, depends on it. Otherwise, he dies.So Pierce knows he's in deep trouble when he arrives at his latest destination to find his payload missing, his case mysteriously empty. Something strange is going on — something that's already cost three couriers their lives and threatens to upend the global order. And Pierce had better get to the bottom of it before the Guild catches up to him.John Wick meets Johnny Mnemonic in a nail-biting cyberpunk technothriller about a courier on the run from his own Guild

Ukraine, 2022. Yeva is a loner and a maverick biologist who lives out of her mobile lab. She scours the country’s forests and valleys, trying and failing to breed rare snails while her relatives urge her to give up, settle down, and start a family. What they don’t know: Yeva already dates plenty of men—not for love, but to fund her work—entertaining Westerners who come to Ukraine on guided romance tours believing they’ll find docile brides uninfluenced by feminism and modernity.Nastia and her sister Solomiya are also entangled in the booming marriage industry, posing as a hopeful bride and her translator while secretly searching for their missing mother—a flamboyant protestor who vanished after years of fierce activism against the romance tours. So begins a journey of a lifetime across hundreds of miles: three angry women, a truckful of kidnapped bachelors, and Lefty, a last-of-his-kind snail with one final shot at perpetuating his species. But their plans come to a screeching halt as Russia invades.

In a city addled by climate change and populated by intelligent robots called “hums,” May loses her job to artificial intelligence. In a desperate bid to resolve her family’s debt and secure their future for another few months, she becomes a guinea pig in an experiment that alters her face so it cannot be recognized by surveillance.Seeking some reprieve from her recent hardships and from her family’s addiction to their devices, she splurges on passes that allow them three nights’ respite inside the Botanical Garden: a rare green refuge where forests, streams, and animals flourish. But her insistence that her son, daughter, and husband leave their devices at home proves far more fraught than she anticipated, and the lush beauty of the Botanical Garden is not the balm she hoped it would be. When her children come under threat, May is forced to put her trust in a hum of uncertain motives as she works to restore the life of her family.Written in taut, urgent prose, Hum is a work of speculative fiction that unflinchingly explores marriage, motherhood, and selfhood in a world compromised by global warming and dizzying technological advancement, a world of both dystopian and utopian possibilities.An extraordinary novel about a wife and mother who—after losing her job to AI—undergoes a procedure that renders her undetectable to surveillance… but at what cost?EndorsementsFrom the National Book Award–longlisted author of The Need.“Helen Phillips, in typical bravura fashion, has found a way to make visible uncomfortable truths about our present by interrogating the near-future.” — Jeff VanderMeer

Why did people, who lived so briefly in this universe, contain so much time?Lina and her ailing father have taken refuge at an enclave called the Sea, a staging post between migrations, with only a few possessions, among them three volumes from The Great Lives of Voyagers encyclopaedia series.In this mysterious and shape-shifting building, pasts and futures collide. Lina befriends her unusual Bento, a Jewish scholar in seventeenth-century Amsterdam; Blucher, a philosopher in 1930s Germany fleeing Nazi persecution; and Jupiter, a poet of Tang Dynasty China, and through their stories, she comes to understand the role of fate in history and the way that ideas can shape the world, and to face up to the cost wrought on her family and others by her father's betrayals.Profound, adventurous, and with extraordinary subtlety of thought, The Book of Records explores our search for home and the place of faith and humanity in our world. A work of huge originality and heft, it shows the great novelist Madeleine Thien at her most ambitious and enriching.

Two fugitives, a man and a child, drive across a stony desert. As dawn breaks, they roll into an abandoned mine site. They’re exhausted, traumatised and desperate, and this is a forsaken place, but as a refuge it’s the most promising they’ve seen. The child peers at the field of desolation. The man thinks to himself, this could work. Problem is, they’re not alone...So begins a searing, epic journey through a life where the challenge is not only to survive; it’s keeping your humanity if you do.Survival is only the beginning. Juice is a stunning novel for fans of Station Eleven and The Road by twice Booker-shortlisted author Tim Winton.Endorsements"A hold-your-breath adventure set in an utterly plausible, sun-hammered future, Juice will stab your conscience and break your heart." — Emma Donoghue

In Five Poems Lake, a small village surrounded by impenetrable deserts, the sun is slowly disappearing overhead. A young woman keeps one apprehensive eye on the sky above as she tends the pharmacy of traditional medicine that belonged to her great grandfather. She has few customers, and even fewer relatives. Her older sister, Dong Ji, her last living relative, works at a wellness parlor across town for those who can afford it—which, during these strange and difficult days, is not many.Five Poems Lake had fallen on hard times long before the sun began shrinking, but now, every few days, a new sliver disappears. As the temperature drops and the lake freezes over, the population of the town realizes that they will soon die—if not of the cold and starvation, then of despair. When the Beacons begin to appear—ordinary people with heads replaced by searing, blinding light, like miniature suns—the town’s residents wonder if they may hold the answer to their salvation, or if they are just another sign of impending ruin. Soon, a photograph found in the possessions of their father, who disappeared mysteriously twelve years ago, will offer another clue in the mystery of the Beacons, and Dong Ji and her sister wonder if they may finally learn what happened to their father.In Sunbirth, An Yu honors the unique relationship between sisters with a richly surreal sensibility that has earned comparisons to the work of Haruki Murakami; the novel is anchored by searching curiosity and wisdom as it asks how much we can ever know about the deepest mysteries of the world.