Tag Archive for: climate apocalypse

Things We Didn’t See Coming follows a single man over three decades as he tries to survive in an increasingly savage apocalyptic world that is at once utterly fantastic and yet disturbingly familiar. Here, coming-of-age is complicated not only by family troubles and mercurial love affairs, but treacherous weather, unstable governments, pandemic, and technology run amok.

‘A small marvel, overflowing with ideas. Scary, funny, shocking and touching by turns, it combines the readerly pleasures of constant reorientation with the sober charge of an urgent warning. Things We Didn’t See Coming refracts our life-and-death fears through those moments of human contact where they are most keenly felt.’ —The Guardian 

Read more of our Climate Classics: timeless works exploring themes of climate change and biodiversity loss.

Opening on the eve of the millennium, when the world as we know it is still recognisable, we meet the nine-year-old narrator as he flees the city with his parents, just ahead of a Y2K breakdown. Next he is a teenager with a growing criminal record, taking his grandparents for a Sunday drive.

In a world transformed by battles over resources, he teaches them how to steal. In time we see him struggle through strange, horrific and unexpectedly funny terrain as he goes about the no longer simple act of survival.

Despite the chaos of his world, he keeps his eyes on the exit door, his heart open and his mind on what he thinks is going to happen next.

 

Read our Librarian’s top climate change fiction picks by heading to our Fiction section