#climate-fiction

#climate-fiction

The award-winning Australian writer's third adult novel begins with a lone woman, Rowan, washed up on a remote island between Tasmania and Antarctica. Shearwater is a research outpost, home to the global seed vault created as a bulwark against climate catastrophe and to colonies of seals, penguins and birds. For eight years, Dominic Salt and his children have lived there, but dangerously rising sea levels mean that they, and the vault, will shortly be evacuated.

It wouldn't be mid-to-late December without a series of "best of" articles coming out from every outlet that covers culture-and who am I to buck that trend? I get to read dozens of books every year for Jezebel, and I'm here to put all that reading to use by doing one of my favorite things: recommending books. But there are too many books-and I am but one, part-time reader-for me to do a broader "best of" list,

Helm by Sarah Hall Faber, out now Hall is best known for her glittering short stories: this is the novel she's been working on for two decades. Set in Cumbria's Eden valley, it tells the story of the Helm the only wind in the UK to be given a name from its creation at the dawn of time up to the current degradation of the climate. It's a huge, millennia-spanning achievement, spotlighting characters from neolithic shamans to Victorian meteorologists to present-day pilots.