We made our way across the busy concourse, found the platform, found the train. Found seats. Sat down. He liked to play hide-and-seek, but could never get the hang of staying hidden and would leap out as soon as I came into a room, shouting, Greengrass is the recipient of a Somerset Maugham Award and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize for her debut collection, An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, which shares with The High House a deep alarm about environmental trauma. Her first novel, 2018’s Sight, was shortlisted for several awards, including the 2018 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Greengrass is working the same terrain others writers have mined, but The High House stands out for our investment in its characters’ fates. Pauly is so young when disaster strikes that much of his understanding of reality is grounded in his life in the High House; he has “forgotten an entire world,” he reflects. Do you think this gives him a greater capacity for happiness or contentedness than the others? Why or why not?

I left school for good at lunchtime on the day I turned eighteen. I walked home. The house was empty. I had no plans, either for the afternoon or for the time beyond it—my life, which stretched empty ahead. Or didn’t. It was becoming clear to everyone now that things were getting worse. The winter before, half of Gloucestershire had been flooded, and the waters, refusing to recede, had made a new fen, covering homes and fields, roads, schools, what had been hills rising now as islands. In York, the river had burst its banks and the city center was gone, walls that had stood for nearly two millennia washed halfway down to Hull. People didn’t say these places were gone. They didn’t say that there were families living in caravans in service stations all along the M5, lined up in the parking lots with volunteers running aid stations out of the garage forecourts. People said,

Then clear across the space between us, before the line went dead, I heard Francesca say, There isn’t time— The woman shrugged, barely looking up, and gave me a number, different to the one I had found in the station, but when I called it, although it rang and rang, no one answered.

A master observer of inter-human atmosphere." - Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers and Lanny Greengrass said she wanted to explore the “disconnect” between our knowledge of the impending disaster of the climate crisis, and our inability to act on it – “that kind of weird space where you can watch something happening that’s terrible, and know that it’s happening, and be afraid of it happening, but still just get on with all of the ordinary things of life”. The High House also takes on parenthood, though none of the four central characters are parents themselves. Grandy, as Sally’s grandfather, and Caro, as Pauly’s sister, both have parental roles, and all three adults are engaged in raising Pauly. The High House, which sustains all of them, exists only because of Francesca’s love for her child. How do characters pass down knowledge? Does raising Pauly mean they must keep going, despite it all? When he is an adult, what motivation do they have left?In the 1970s, there seemed to be a lot of books about orphaned or motherless girls who had to take on adult responsibilities and in so doing learned that love is more important than a clean house. I recall reading that book at least twice as Reeney by Molly Cone and another one about some orphan girl named Ellen. If Judy Blume hasn't already written that book then she probably will at some point. Sally thrives in this pastoral setup, learning everything Grandy can teach her. She grows garlic from seed, cans fruits and vegetables, hunts and fishes. He mentors her in mending and fixing essentials as the years pass and their community of neighbors dwindles. Sally is old enough to remember “the beginning of things, when we were still uncertain, and it was still possible to believe that nothing whatever was wrong, barring an unusual run of hot Julys and January storms.” If she thinks that, then what’s she doing at the high house? She knows there’ll be something left. A ruined living, maybe, and a hard world, but hasn’t it always been that for most? All I can think is that what’s different now is that no one can claim this is progress. Station by station the train emptied. We ran east into the tail end of the morning and then into the afternoon, rattling through the outskirts of the city, through its hinterland to what lay beyond, a succession of small towns with bunting strung across their streets giving out to fields, to woods, to the curve of a river and children standing on a white-painted bridge, a village with a fête, a farm with horses. Pink houses sat alone between hedges. Unfamiliar stations stood undisturbed. By the end there was only us and one other woman, who sat two seats in front of us and turned to stare at me. Pauly breathed a cloud onto the window and used his finger to draw faces in it. We followed the river out toward the sea, first through the outskirts of the town, past the new-built housing estates and the playgrounds, the primary school, the supermarket with its parking lot, the drive-through fast-food restaurant and the petrol station. Pauly walked beside me, holding my hand.

The Stranding is joined on the debut shortlist by Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Open Water, which judges called a “nuanced portrayal of the realities of race today”, poet AK Blakemore’s The Manningtree Witches, set in Essex in 1643 as a puritanical fervour grips the nation, and Emily Itami’s Fault Lines, in which Mizuki, lonely in spite of her family, falls for Kiyoshi and begins an affair. We are delighted to celebrate these 20 brilliant books as we mark a milestone 50th anniversary year,” said Jill McDonald, chief executive of prize sponsor Costa Coffee. “There’s so much here for readers to explore, enjoy, recommend and share.” I start to dig. Sometimes Pauly is right and the digging does help—if not straightaway, then later, when I sleep a little better in the night. At other times the digging makes my hands ache, and Pauly takes the spade away and says,In the afternoon, Francesca put her laptop on the kitchen table while she made oat bars and, sitting with my feet propped up on Pauly’s high chair, eating raisins she had spilled, I watched news footage of families hunched under tarpaulins. They looked resigned, as though they already understood what they had become a part of, and I tried to stop myself from crying because I was ashamed of my tears, which were neither compassionate, nor empathic, nor kind, but came because I was afraid, very suddenly and directly, for myself. Heading outside the varied gardens are enchanting and include a walled lawn garden that is perfect forrelaxing on a summer afternoon. There is a large patio area with top of the range electric ignition charcoal barbeque and an oak garden table for twelve guests, with an outside sound system and evening lighting,all situated under a pergola with amature grapevine for summer shade.A largeluxury hot tub off the rear of the lawn in a private corner is a special retreat,while a gate at the far end of the lawn leads directly onto Dunster Deer Park and Castle Grounds. A further area of garden with a Mediterranean influence is found beyond a cobbled area with a boot room, where guests can store their bikes. This Mediterranean styled walled garden also provides luxurious curved outside sofa seating for ten guests with large summer parasol and champagne/wine chiller, and stunning views to Conygar Tower. Nearby theretwo games rooms that offer a pool table, table tennis and darts, and a fitnessgym in a Moroccan style studio with a fullwidth wall of mirrors. The next morning, when I went downstairs, father was in the kitchen drinking coffee, and Francesca was gone.

he asked, and I shrugged one shoulder up and slid my eyes away. There had been daffodils in the park at Christmas. The coast path had been redrawn at six different places over the last three years. Caro muses that “there is a kind of organic mercy, grown deep inside us, that makes it so much easier to care about small, close things, else how could we live? As I grew up, crisis slid from distant threat to imminent probability, and we tuned it out like static, we adjusted to each emergent normality, and did what we had always done. . . .” How does this focus on “small, close things” play out over the course of the novel, even in the midst of crisis? she went on, speaking with such fierceness that I thought her words might drill holes through the lath and plaster to let her out of the room, out of our lives,They were silent for a long time then, and I stood very still in the corridor and thought of Pauly, the way his body twitched in his sleep, the tense look he got when Francesca was there, and how it was not hard at all for me to tell if he was happy or not.