Jessie Greengrass

In this powerful, highly anticipated novel from an award-winning author, four people attempt to make a home in the midst of environmental disaster. Perched on a sloping hill, set away from a small town by the sea, the High House has a tide pool and a mill, a vegetable garden, and, most importantly, a barn full of supplies. Caro, Pauly, Sally, and Grandy are safe, so far, from the rising water that threatens to destroy the town and that has, perhaps, already destroyed everything else. But for how long? Caro and her younger half-brother, Pauly, arrive at the High House after her father and stepmother fall victim to a faraway climate disaster—but not before they call and urge Caro to leave London. In their new home, a converted summer house cared for by Grandy and his granddaughter, Sally, the two pairs learn to live together. Yet there are limits to their safety, limits to the supplies, limits to what Grandy—the former village caretaker, a man who knows how to do everything—can teach them as his health fails. A searing novel that takes on parenthood, sacrifice, love, and survival under the threat of extinction, The High House is a stunning, emotionally precise novel about what can be salvaged at the end of the world.

A Novel

The High House

Amelia

What guiding principle was ever needed, besides habit, and the peculiar happiness of home?

Their deaths, although we didn't like to say so, were not really a disaster to us, because disaster would only come when it had our own faces on it — and now, here it was. 

They're nesting out on the marshes. The weather seems to have confused them and they're trying to overwinter here. Pauly goes to visit them every day, to make sure that they're safe. 

Well, the vicar said, I don't see why not. Who needs our prayers, if not the birds?

This is mercy, which is the best that we can hope for. We do what we can for one another. We try to be kind.

The High House quotes

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