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A Children’s Bible | Lydia Millett

 

A group of children are holidaying with their parents in a crumbling lakeside mansion. Having long since diagnosed the adults as boozy, self-absorbed, and allergic to consequence, they retreat into a shadow society of their own, closer to feral than filial. When the storms come and the lights go out, the grown-ups drink through the apocalypse while the children, led by the deadpan Eve and her strange, prophetic little brother Jack, start actually doing something about survival. Millett’s genius is to smuggle an entire eco-apocalypse into a story of Genesis playfully rewritten by the generation stuck cleaning up after their forebears. A compelling, unsentimental, and quietly devastating read.

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Yellow Pine | Claire Vaye Watkins

 

As Watkins’ celebrated Gold, Fame, Citrus showed, she has never been interested in comfortable fiction. Her latest novel, set in the Mohave desert, digs deeper into the discomfort through its protagonist Rose, an on-and-off Twelve-Stepper circling an old flame and craving another baby. The Yellow Pine of the title –a real solar farm in Nevada – embodies the central tension of the book: the collision between “green” energy and the wild land it demolishes. The result is a story that mourns the land as Rose knew it while insisting, stubbornly, on love, joy, humour, and the hope of future life amid the ruins: a novel that understands grief and vitality are not opposites, but conjoined twins.

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The Rewilding | Donna M Cameron

 

Donna M Cameron’s novel is a striking hybrid of thriller, love story, family reckoning, and sly polemic about a planet on fire. Jagger Eckerman, on the run from his billionaire father and his hit men, hides deep in a rain forest in a cave already occupied by Nia — a woman on a mission to save the planet. But Nia isn’t just the story’s love interest: she is also its conscience, challenging Jagger’s first-world faith in technofixes and steadily dismantling them. Cameron’s gripping narrative is proof that cli-fi doesn’t have to choose between urgency and heart.

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Arboreality | Rebecca Campbell

 

Campbell’s brilliant cli-fi novella weaves an intergenerational story of human resilience against the backdrop of ongoing ecological collapse. Rooted in the dire consequences of unchecked colonial capitalism, the story juxtaposes grief and loss alongside survival and regeneration. A professor rescues books from the flooded and collapsing McPherson Library. A man plants fireweed on the hillside of his depopulated Vancouver Island suburb. An aspiring luthier poaches the last ancient Sitka spruce to make a violin for a child prodigy. Campbell’s astonishing vision pulls the echoing effects of small acts and intimate moments through this interconnected story of how a west coast community survives the ravages of climate change.

A gentle and thought-provoking narrative that lingers long after the last page.

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Earth 7 | Deb Olin Unferth

 

“Earth had gotten the best the universe had to offer, in all categories, and the achievement had nearly killed her.” Enter Unferth’s teenage protagonist Dylan Stein. Most of America has been reduced to a desert wasteland, yet Dylan longs to leave her home community of Sea Garden, a “luxury pod” on the ocean floor. Finally, at the “fully terraformed resort” of Vacationland, she meets and falls in love with Melanie–a girl so engineered that she can pass as a robot–and together they decide to create a genetic database as an “Earth backup” from which to rebuild the Earth. While Unferth writes elegiacally about humankind’s death drive, the wild energy of her comedy transcends the grief of humankind’s predicament, and raises a thousand smiles. And boy, do we need them.

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Daylight Come | Diana McCaulay

 

This haunting novel is set in a dystopian future where sunlight is rationed and controlled by a tyrannical regime. The story follows a young girl, Ava, as she navigates a world of scarcity, fear, and rebellion, all while grappling with her own family’s dark secrets. The novel explores themes of power, oppression, and resilience, drawing parallels to real-world issues of environmental degradation and authoritarianism. Ava’s journey is both gripping and poignant, making this a thought-provoking read.

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The Last Children of Tokyo | Yoko Tawada

 

Yoshiro thinks he might never die. A hundred years old and counting, he is one of Japan’s many ‘old-elderly’; men and women who remember a time before the air and the sea were poisoned, before terrible catastrophe promted Japan to shut itself off from the rest of the world. He may live for decades yet, but he knows his beloved great-grandson – born frail and prone to sickness – might not survive to adulthood. Day after day, it takes all of Yoshiro’s sagacity to keep Mumei alive.

As hopes for Japan’s youngest generation fade, a secretive organisation embarks on an audacious plan to find a cure – might Yoshiro’s great-grandson be the key to saving the last children of Tokyo?

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Dream State | Eric Puchner

 

Puchner’s engrossing multi-generational portrait of a groups of family and friends in Montana is a thoughtful examination of love, loss, and the enduring effects of past choices. But it is in its depiction of the desecration of wildlife and the creeping effects of climate breakdown that it excels. The story starts by an idyllic Montana lake in the present era, with the quickly-doomed wedding of Ceci and Charlie. But as the decades go by, we see how the lives of the bride, the groom, his best man and their families are shaped by good or bad luck, critical decisions, betrayals – and the creeping effects of wildlife habitat loss and climate breakdown. Like the best novels that deal with environmental issues, it’s in specifics – like the sinking water level in the once-pristine lake, or the disappearance of the native wolverine – that the present and the near-future are brought to poignantly exquisite life.

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Jeff VanderMeer | Area X

 

Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series, beginning with the iconic trilogy—Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptanceand extending to the fourth volume, Absolution, is an immersive, often disturbing exploration of the unknowable forces of nature, and humanity’s inability to understand and govern them. In evoking the uncanniness of plant and animal life in the mysterious nature reserve-cum-force-field known as Area X, VanderMeer offers a nuanced encounter with a universe that is simultaneously beautiful, horrifying, and transformative. This collection that cements his status as one of the most innovative writers of contemporary speculative literature.

 

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Every Version of You | Grace Chan

 

Set against the backdrop of the planet’s failing ecosystems in late-21st-century Australia, Tao-Yi and her partner Navin spend most of their time inside an immersive, consumerist virtual reality called Gaia. They log on, go to work, socialise and even eat in this digital utopia. Meanwhile, their ageing bodies lie suspended in pods inside cramped apartments.

Across the city, in the abandoned real world, Tao-Yi’s mother remains stubbornly offline, dwindling away between hospital visits and memories of her earlier 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.

This spellbinding novel unpicks the ties between life and technology to ask what truly makes us human, and what in our world is worth preserving.

Brilliant, clever and thoughtful.

Longlisted for the Climate Fiction Prize 2026