There’s even a tubthumping fringe politician who “says it like it is” and keeps saying it like it is until he’s manoeuvred himself into power, ready to turn on the people he’d hoodwinked to get him there. You said earlier that it’s quite similar to How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff, which you considered including in your list of five. He sat with me for an hour. Fed me chocolate. Kept saying I was an idiot. I kept saying I was an idiot too, and that he was. I don’t know why we said that to each other so much all through our lives. Maybe because we both always knew we weren’t. Somehow he managed to make me laugh too. We both laughed. I can’t remember what about. Fear, euphoria — they’re weirdly close together sometimes.” (P. 298) As Jessie Greengrass said during the book festival event, facing the reality of climate change is a lot like confronting the inevitability of your own death. That's incredibly hard to manage and I don't blame novelists for ending books more gently and ambivalently than with 'They died'. I find it interesting to observe this trend, though. Climate change novels have only become more common in the five or so years - prior to that I looked for and struggled to find them. The recent ones I've read ( Kim Stanley Robinson aside) explore the immediate impacts through personal narratives rather than a polyphonic multiple narrator structure. I wonder if (and would like to think that) this is a first stage in Western fictional processing of the climate crisis and that we'll soon see more sprawling epics and attempts to write ourselves better futures. The ambiguous endings make for a more comfortable reading experience, while also slightly letting the reader off the hook. They leave space for the hope that everything will turn out OK on a personal level without massive socioeconomic change, so readers can assume this if inclined to. Based on the scientific evidence, I don't think that's remotely plausible and we in the rich world need to accept that massive change is happening whether we like it or not. Margate in particular has seen its fortunes become decidedly mixed in recent decades. By the 1980s the once thriving holiday destination saw its hotels and guesthouses being converted into cheap bedsits, where there was money to be made by landlords trousering government money to house the poor and vulnerable displaced from London and other parts of the south-east by a combination of austerity and the ever-rising cost of living.

Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee | Waterstones

The Final Revival Of Opal & Nev, by Dawnie Walton and our new Mirror Book Club book of the month - Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin (see below) A beautiful book: thought-provoking, eerily prescient and very witty.’ Brit Bennett, author of The Vanishing Half I don’t know. There are so many scenes, and most of them seem frozen now. My mum too — I’d freeze her right then if I could. After we got the news about her parents, she decided, she told us, to relax a little. Which meant go out more. There were nights when she came home with blood on her top, or no shoes on — with Liam, without him — but she was still just about on the edge of being okay then. All Chance, her elder brother to another father J.D. and her younger brother Blue have is sheer grit and determination, driven by a ceaseless need to survive, an impulse which not always rewarded and which comes up emptyhanded. The book is an insightful look into the way society views individuals and ranks them based on their financial value over a more humanist approach. The judgement placed on those in need, totally dismissing the impact of access to resources, as well as the ease with which people can turn on others to save themselves.

In Chance’s day-to-day life, the hope she clings to may not have the power to move mountains necessarily – if it did, she would have long ago used it to alter her life beyond all current recognition – but it does have the power, most of the time at least to sustain Chance through a life full of abuse, deprivation, loss, death, economic collapse and manipulative cruelty.

Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee By Nina Allan Strange Horizons - Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee By Nina Allan

According to your research, how far into the future is the Kent coast predicted to be flooded to the extent depicted in Dreamland ? Dreamland is set in a near-future Margate, an turbulent seaside town on the south-east coast of England. The main character Chance is born in the year the novel was published—so, 2021. We leapfrog to her being seven, then again to where she is 16. It’s a portrait of the nation through a very personal lens: Chance’s family are given a grant to leave London and move to the coast, just as sea levels are rising, and more extreme political ideas are taking centre-stage. And through it all, it’s a love story. Then there is Saudi Arabia, where oil is running out, and post-Brexit United Kingdom, which remains a powerful and influential nation. For me, they’ve held an appeal since I was a child. One of the books I’m going to talk about is Z for Zachariah; I remember it lighting a flame in me. Dystopias put you in a world where characters (and thus, in some way you, as a reader) have to fight to survive. It makes all those structures of society that make life sanitised and safe suddenly disappear, and I think that’s something that can be particularly appealing to young people—the idea of suddenly, drastically having agency. In the coastal resort of Margate, hotels lie empty and sun-faded 'For Sale' signs line the streets. The sea is higher - it's higher everywhere - and those who can are moving inland. A young girl called Chance, however, is just arriving.

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Dreamland is up there with the bleakest books I've read to the point of almost being overwhelming. It imagines a not too distant future where patterns relocating people living in London council houses and climate change merge together with catastrophic consequences. The dread and horror is unrelenting, while also hitting a little too close to home. Chance falls in love with Francesca, a wealthy Londoner who is working with one of those aid charities. While Chance dreams of forging a life together, Francesca is evasive. Chance is a vividly drawn character. We see that she has lived a brutal life and that her future holds little promise. We can understand why she wants to be with Francesca, and grab a part of her world, however fleeting. But their on-off relationship may pall with some readers after a while. There is nothing fairytale about this world, which finds itself evoked in writing that is both searingly serious and unexpectedly funny (how else do you deal with day-to-day disappointments without a heady sense of the ridiculous), and Rankin-Gee never once pretends otherwise; however, the weight of so much misery and extremist hellishness does not then preclude any sense of optimism, however tenuous, which finds expression in ways that will surprise and enthrall you. Pessimistic forecasts put 2037, which is where the main part of the story takes place, at 2 ft+, but it’s not linear or predictable. There are lots of terrifying potential tipping points. Steady declines, and then cliff-edges.