Immerse friends, family — or yourself — in climate futures over the holidays » Yale Climate Connections

In April 2005, climate author and activist Bill McKibben challenged artists to respond to climate change. “Where,” he asked, “are the books? The poems? The plays? The goddamn operas?” (He mentions “The Day After Tomorrow,” released the previous year, later in his essay.)

I don’t have tallies for poems, plays, and operas, but I can say that over the decade that followed, filmmakers and novelists responded with equal enthusiasm to McKibben’s challenge. Then, after 2015, the output of filmmakers became more sporadic. Novelists, by contrast, steadily increased their production.

In 2024, the breadth and diversity of these stories prompted Climate Spring, a self-organized group of writers and critics, to invite nominations for the first annual Climate Fiction Prize. When the winner was announced in May 2025, Yale Climate Connections published the full list of nine finalists.  

Five months later, Yale Climate Connection highlighted another nine titles for Halloween. “Climate fiction that will haunt you,” the title promised.

Now, for the holidays, we have put together a new list of a dozen titles, only three of which have appeared in previous bookshelves.

The list begins with three anthologies of stories, essays, and artwork. Six novels by American writers follow, some published within the last two months. The list concludes with three works by writers from India, the Netherlands, and the UK. Two of these novels, “What We Can Know” by Ian McEwan and “A Guardian and a Thief” by Megha Majumdar, have appeared in year-end best books of 2025 lists.

As always, the descriptions of the books are adapted from copy provided by their publishers.

Metamorphosis: Climate Fiction for a Better Future, edited by Grist (Milkweed Editions 2025, 232 pages, $20.00 paperback)

Otherworldly but remarkably familiar, ancestral but firmly rooted in alternate futures, these twelve innovative stories—winners of the Imagine 2200 climate fiction contest—offer a glimpse of a future built on sustainability, inclusivity, and justice. A beekeeper collaborates on a bee-based warning system for floods. An Indian family preserves its traditions through the latest communication fads. And after an oceanic rapture, a lone survivor adapts to living in a tree on a small island with a vulture he befriends. Curated by Grist, the leading media organization dedicated to empowering stories of climate change, Metamorphosis is a visionary and speculative collection. Its stories illustrate how fiction can help us envision a tomorrow in which we thrive.

Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures, edited by Joey Eschrich and Ed Finn (The MIT Press 2025, 354 pages, $40.00 paperback)

When we think of climate, the stories we tell about the future are often catastrophic: megastorms, crop failures, and heat waves loom over us, sending a signal that the problem is so vast, so complex, that it’s out of our control. That narrative is compelling for some, but leaves others feeling hopeless, helpless, and disillusioned. Through short speculative fiction, essays, and visual art, Climate Imagination seeks to inspire a wave of narratives about what positive climate futures might look like for communities around the world, from China to Wales, Germany to Nigeria, Sri Lanka to Mexico, Malaysia, India, Brazil, the United States, and more.

We Will Rise Again: Speculative Stories and Essays on Protest, Resistance, and Hope, edited by Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz, and Malka Older (Saga Press 2025, 384 pages, $20.00 paperback)

In this collection, editors Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz, and Malka Older champion realistic, progressive social change using the speculative stories of writers across the world. Exploring topics ranging from disability justice and environmental activism to community care and collective worldbuilding, these imaginative pieces from writers such as NK Jemisin, Charlie Jane Anders, Alejandro Heredia, Sam J. Miller, Nisi Shawl, and Sabrina Vourvoulias center solidarity, empathy, hope, joy, and creativity. Using the vehicle of ambitious storytelling, We Will Rise Again offers effective tools for organizing, an unflinching interrogation of the status quo, and a blueprint for prefiguring a different world.

Awake in the Floating City: A Novel by Susanna Kwan (Pantheon 2025, 320 pages, $28.00)

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. 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 in the building who wants to hire Bo to be her caregiver. Suddenly, Bo has a reason to stay. Mia can be prickly, and yet she and Bo forge a connection deeper than any Bo has had with a client. Listening to Mia, recalling her own memories, Bo’s struck by how much history will be lost as the city gives way to water. Bo determines to honor their disappearing world and this woman who’s brought her back to it.

The Float Test: A Novel by Lynn Steger Strong (Harper Collins 2025, 272 pages, $28.99)

The Kenner siblings are at odds. Gathered after a major loss, each sibling needs the others more than ever. Jenn is a harried mom struggling under the weight of family obligations. Fred is a novelist who has lost faith in storytelling. Jude is a recovering corporate lawyer with a grudge against her former favorite sister, Fred. George, the baby, estranged from his wife, harbors a secret about his former employer. When the four are reunited, it’s clear that much has changed between them. Equally unsettling are the changes around them; the climate of their hometown is hotter and more oppressive than ever before. The Float Test is an elegant and gripping testament to the power that family has to both nurture and destroy us.

All the Water in the World: A Novel by Eiren Caffall (St. Martin’s Press 2025, 304 pages, $29.00)

All the Water in the World is told in the voice of a girl gifted with a deep feeling for water. In the years after the glaciers melted, Nonie, her older sister, and her parents and their researcher friends have stayed behind in an almost deserted New York City, creating a settlement on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History. They hunt and grow their food in Central Park as they work to save the collections of human history and science. When a superstorm breaches the city’s flood walls, Nonie and her family must escape north on the Hudson. Along the swollen river, they encounter communities that have adapted in very different and sometimes frightening ways. But they are determined to find a way to make a new world that honors all they have saved.

Ancestors: A Novel by adrienne maree brown (AK Press 2025, 256 pages, $19.00 paperback)

Ancestors is the powerful conclusion to adrienne maree brown’s Grievers trilogy—a story of how life blooms amid tragedy and hate. In the wake of a mysterious pandemic known as Syndrome H-8, the survivors of a ravaged and isolated Detroit are building a future inside the network of deserted skyscrapers that define the city’s skyline. Dune’s magic keeps a lush green wall encircling the community, and while some settle inside its safety, others grow desperate to get out, fueling the tension between shelter and confinement. As Dune’s power blossoms and her connection to the spirits of the departed deepens, she must learn how to balance the needs of her people, both living and dead.

Happy Bad: A Novel by Delaney Nolan (Astra House 2025, 320 pages, $26.00)

Beatrice works at Twin Bridge, a chronically underfunded residential treatment center in near-future East Texas, teeming with enraged teenage girls on either too many or not enough drugs. On a normal day, it’s difficult for Beatrice and the other staff—Arda, Carmen, and Linda—to keep their cool in dust-blown Askewn. But when a heat wave triggers a massive, sustained blackout, Beatrice and the other staff and residents must evacuate. Facing police brutality, sweltering heat, panicked evacuees, the girls’ mounting withdrawal, and the consequences of her own lies, they search for a route out of the blackout zone. A catastrophe novel by turns tender and hilarious, fueled by a low-simmering political rage, Happy Bad is a rocket arrived on Earth.

Bad Nature: A Novel by Ariel Courage (Henry Holt & Company 2025, 304 pages, $28.99

When Hester is diagnosed with terminal cancer on her fortieth birthday, she knows immediately what she must do: abandon her possessions and drive to California to kill her estranged father. With nothing tying her to the life she’s built in New York City, she quits her lucrative job in corporate law and starts driving west. She hasn’t made it far when she runs into John, an environmental activist in need of a ride to superfund sites across the United States. The two slowly make their way across the country. Bad Nature is a story of stunning detours and twists until its final destination. Part road-trip novel, part lament for our ongoing ecological crisis, it’s a deft examination of the indulgence of holding grudges and the eternal possibility of redemption.

Sea Now: A Novel by Eva Meijer, translated by Anne Thompson Melo (Two Lines Press 2025, 180 pages, $18.00 paperback)

The catastrophe that everyone knew was coming has arrived—the dykes are breached, the tideline rises a kilometer a day, and the citizens of the Netherlands are forced into gyms and shelters in Germany and Belgium. Online retailers do flash sale promotions on disaster kits. There is violence and looting, but some people are too tired to start over again and simply walk into the rising tide. Not willing to simply move on, three women get into a small boat and ride back out over the flooded cities, looking for loved ones they know are likely drowned. On the way, they witness a world retaken by seabirds, whales, and kelp forests. Philosopher and linguist Eva Meijer’s new novel redefines climate fiction by bringing the resilience of the natural world to the fore.

What We Can Know: A Novel by Ian McEwan (Knopf 2025, 320 pages, $30.00)

2119: Just over one hundred years in the future, much of the western world has been submerged by rising seas following a catastrophic nuclear accident. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost. In the water-logged south of what used to be England, Thomas Metcalfe, a lonely scholar, longs for the early twenty-first century as he chases the ghost of one poem, ‘A Corona for Vivian’. How wild and full of risk their lives were, thinks Thomas, as he pores over the archives of that distant era. When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the elusive poem’s discovery, a story is revealed of entangled loves and a brutal crime that destroy his assumptions about people he thought he knew intimately well.

A Guardian and a Thief: A Novel by Megha Majumdar (Knopf 2025, 224 pages, $29.00)

In a near-future Kolkata, Ma, her two-year-old daughter, and her elderly father are just days from leaving the collapsing city behind to join Ma’s husband in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After procuring their visas, they pack their bags for the flight to America. But in the morning, they awaken to discover that Ma’s purse, containing their immigration documents, has been stolen. A Guardian and a Thief tells two stories: the story of Ma’s frantic search for the thief while keeping hunger at bay, and the story of Boomba, the thief, whose desperation to care for his family drives him to commit a series of escalating crimes. In their separate ways, the two families discover how far they will go to secure their children’s future as they stave off encroaching catastrophe.