Right at a time when many of us are getting serious about our summer reading lists, the winner of The 2026 Climate Fiction Prize has been announced in London. The author who will collect the £10,000 prize is Helen Phillips; her late-2024 novel, Hum, tells the story of a woman whose life is warped by AI in “a near-future world addled by climate change.”
This is only the second time the Climate Fiction Prize has been awarded. (Readers can find Yale Climate Connections’ account of the first prize, awarded in 2025, here.) Created and supported by the UK-based global climate storytelling organization Climate Spring, the award celebrates full-length English-language novels that engage climate change as a central theme. Authors of any nationality are eligible, but the book must be published by an established imprint in the UK. Helen Phillips is an American; she is an associate professor at Brooklyn College.
Selecting the 2026 winner was a seven-month process. Publishers submitted works for consideration last October and November. A long list of 12 titles was announced in February; a short list of six titles was announced in March.
So that readers can take full advantage of the prize judges’ work, this bookshelf provides covers, links, and edited blurbs for the American editions of all 12 of the titles initially selected.
As always, the descriptions are adapted from copy provided by the publishers. When two dates of publication are listed, the second is for the paperback edition.
Winner of the 2026 Climate Fiction Prize
Hum: A Novel by Helen Phillips (Scribners 2024/2025, 288 pages, $17.99 paperback)
In a near-future world addled by climate change and inhabited by intelligent robots called “hums,” May loses her job to artificial intelligence. Desperate to resolve her family’s debt and secure their future for another few months, she becomes a guinea pig in an experiment that alters her face so it cannot be recognized by surveillance. Seeking reprieve from her recent hardships and her family’s addiction to their devices, May splurges on passes for her family to spend three nights’ respite in the Botanical Garden: a rare green refuge where forests, streams, and animals still thrive. But when her children come under threat, May is forced to put her trust in a hum of uncertain motives to save her family.
The five other titles short-listed for the 2026 Climate Fiction Prize
Dusk: A Novel by Robbie Arnott (Astra House 2025, 272 pages, $26)
In the distant highlands, a puma named Dusk is killing shepherds. Down in the lowlands, twins Iris and Floyd are out of work, money, and friends. When they hear that a bounty has been placed on Dusk, they reluctantly decide to join the hunt. As they journey up into this wild, haunted country, they discover there’s far more to the land and people of the highlands than they imagined. And as they close in on their prey, they’re forced to reckon with conflicts both ancient and deeply personal. From the critically acclaimed and award-winning author of The Rain Heron, Dusk is a masterful, mythical tale of loss, redemption, and survival.
The Tiger’s Share by Keshava Guha (John Murray Press 2025/2026, 256 pages, $18.99 paperback)
The fiercest wars are fought between siblings. Tara is everything her younger brother isn’t: dedicated, independent, thriving. When their father retires, he summons them to a meeting. But what he has to say threatens to tear the family apart.
Tara’s friend Lila has it all. But when Lila’s father dies unexpectedly, her brother wastes no time in claiming what he thinks is his. Against a backdrop of ecological collapse and political unrest, together, Tara and Lila are forced to confront the challenge that their ambition poses to patriarchal Delhi society.
Awake in the Floating City by Susanna Kwan (Pantheon/Vintage 2025/2026, 320 pages, $19 paperback)
Bo knows she should go. Years of rain have drowned the city and almost everyone else has fled. Her mother was carried away in a storm surge and ever since, Bo has been alone. She is stalled: an artist unable to make art, a daughter unable to give up the hope that her mother may still be alive. Half-heartedly, she allows her cousin to plan for her escape – but as the departure day approaches, she finds a note slipped under her door from Mia, an elderly woman who lives in her building and wants to hire Bo to be her caregiver. Suddenly, Bo has a reason to stay. Mia can be prickly, and yet still she and Bo forge a deep connection. Mia shares stories of her life that pull Bo back toward art, toward the practice she thought she’d abandoned. Bo determines to be present, to commemorate a life and a place soon to be lost forever.
Endling: A Novel by Maria Reva (Penguin Random/Vintage 2025/2026, 352 pages, $18 paperback)
Ukraine, 2022. Yeva is a loner and a maverick scientist who lives out of her mobile lab, trying and failing to breed rare snails. In a stunningly ambitious and achingly raw metafictional spiral, Endling brilliantly balances horror and comedy, drawing on Reva’s own experiences as a Ukrainian expat tracking her family’s delicate dance of survival behind enemy lines. As fiction and reality collide on the page, Reva probes the hard truths of war: What stories must we tell ourselves to survive? To carry on with the routines of life under military occupation? And for those of us watching from overseas: Can our sense of normalcy and security ever be restored, or have they always been a fragile illusion? Endling is a tour de force from an author who weaves a story of love, loss, humor, and devastation that only she can tell.
The Book of Records: A Novel by Madeleine Thien (W.W. Norton & Co. 2025/2026, 384 pages, $18.99 paperback)
Lina and her father arrive at an enclave called The Sea, a staging post between migrations, with only a few possessions. In this mysterious and shape-shifting place, pasts and futures collide. Lina befriends her neighbors: Bento, a Jewish scholar in 17th-century Amsterdam; Blucher, a philosopher in 1930s Germany fleeing Nazi persecution; and Jupiter, a poet of Tang Dynasty China. Generational change and the ethical imagination are at the heart of Lina’s illuminating conversations with her fellows in The Sea: how we come to believe what we believe, and how every person is an irreplaceable, unique vessel of history. The Book of Records is an indelible testament to the migratory nature of humanity and our ceaseless search for a home ―in the physical world, in history, and in cyberspace―in the wake of catastrophe.
Titles longlisted for the 2026 Climate Fiction Prize
Every Version of You by Grace Chan (Verve 2025, 288 pages, $19.95 paperback)
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, socialize, and even eat in this digital utopia. Meanwhile, their aging 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.
Helm: A Novel by Sarah Hall (Harper/Mariner Books 2025, 368 pages, $30)
Helm is a ferocious, mischievous wind – a subject of folklore and awe, part-elemental god, part-aerial demon blasting through the sublime landscape of northern England since the dawn of time. Through the stories of those who’ve obsessed over Helm, an extraordinary history is formed: the Neolithic tribe who tried to placate Helm, the Dark Age wizard priest who wanted to banish Helm, the Victorian steam engineer who attempted to capture Helm – and the farmer’s daughter who fiercely loved Helm. But now Dr. Selima Sutar, surrounded by infinite clouds and measuring instruments in her observation hut, fears human pollution is killing Helm. Rich, wild, and vital, Helm is the story of a singular life force, and of the relationship between nature and people, neither of whom can weather life without the other.
Albion: A Novel by Anna Hope (Harper 2025/2026, 368 pages, $18.99 paperback)
The Brooke family members are gathering in their 18th-century ancestral home to bury Philip: husband, father, and the blinding sun around which they have orbited their entire lives. Eldest daughter Frannie has dreams of returning the estate to nature: a last line of defense against the coming climate catastrophe. Her brother Milo envisages a haven for the superrich. Isa, the youngest, only hopes to reconnect with her childhood love who still lives on the estate. And then there is Clara, who arrives from America, shrouded in secrets and bearing a truth that will fracture all the dreams on which they’ve built their lives. Beautifully layered and utterly compelling, Anna Hope’s multigenerational saga is a bold and brilliant examination of family secrets, colonial legacies, and class, set against the backdrop of the climate crisis.
The Price of Everything: A Novel by Jon McGoran (Solaris 2025, 384 pages, $16.99 paperback)
When Armand Pierce joined the Couriers Guild, after the Cyber-Wars cratered the internet, he had a titanium cuff bolted to his wrist and an attaché case chained to it. He took an oath: The delivery is everything. It’s the Guild’s guarantee, and all business, legitimate or otherwise, depends on it. He can run, fight – kill, if he needs to – but the package gets where it’s going. Otherwise, he dies. So Pierce knows he’s in deep trouble when he arrives at his latest destination to find his payload missing, his case mysteriously empty. Something strange is going on. Something that’s already cost three couriers their lives. On the run from the guild’s assassins, Pierce must navigate a dense network of oligarchs, drug dealers, private police forces, and brilliant but radical climate activists to get to the bottom of a scheme that could change everything.
Juice: A Novel by Tim Winton (Pan Macmillan 2024/2025, 528 pages, $20 paperback)
Survival is only the beginning. Two fugitives, a man and a child, drive across a stony desert. As dawn breaks, they roll into an abandoned mine site. They’re exhausted, traumatized, desperate now. This is a forsaken place, but as a refuge, it’s the most promising they’ve seen. The child peers at the field of desolation. The man thinks to himself, this could work. Problem is, they’re not alone … So begins a searing journey through a life where the challenge is not only to survive; it’s keeping your humanity if you do.
Sunbirth: A Novel by An Yu (Grove Atlantic 2025/2026, 320 pages, $17 paperback)
Five Poems Lake had fallen on hard times long before the sun began shrinking, but now, every few days, a new sliver disappears. As the temperature drops and the lake freezes over, the population of the town realizes that they will soon die – if not of the cold and starvation, then of despair. When the Beacons begin to appear – ordinary people with heads replaced by searing, blinding light, like miniature suns – the town’s residents wonder if they may hold the answer to their salvation, or if they are just another sign of impending ruin. A photograph belonging to their father, who died mysteriously 12 years ago, may offer a clue in the mystery of the Beacons, and Dong Ji and her sister wonder if they may finally learn what happened to their father.
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