“IT IS worse, much worse, than you think.” From its first sentence, The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future (Penguin Books) by US writer David Wallace-Wells is a deeply frightening read in chronicling the existential threat the climate crisis poses to humanity.

He notes that all the commitments made at the 2015 Paris UN climate summit by the 195 signatories would still mean a deadly 3.2°C of warming by 2100. If this isn’t terrifying enough, he explains that, as of 2018, “not a single major industrial nation was on track to fulfil the commitments it made in the Paris treaty.”

Answering Amitav Ghosh’s call for more fiction devoted to climate change, John Lanchester’s allegorical novel The Wall (Faber & Faber) considers how British society and politics could react to a climatic event called “the change.”