Caro and Pauly arrive just in time to learn of Francesca’s and their father's deaths, and they settle in to the high house for whatever slow and limping limbo humankind has left to it. Francesca has hired as caretakers an irascible young woman named Sal and her grandfather. Just before she and her husband are killed in a storm on the East Coast of the U.S., Francesca tells Caro to decamp from London with Pauly to a remote bluffside home that she's worked, unbeknownst to the kids, to make into a refuge, a well-stocked, mostly self-sustaining hidy-hole. (Francesca's husband, the children's father, has begun traveling with her to aid her work.) Francesca is a fascinating character-high-minded, laser-focused, sanctimonious, apparently allergic to joy her neglect has a sadness in it, too, that of the parent who feels called to "higher" duty and who, it will turn out, has done the best she can in the ways that align with her skills and her inclinations. As the global situation deteriorates, she more and more leaves her teenage stepdaughter, Caro, in charge of her young son, Pauly, and the two half siblings develop a powerful bond. British author Greengrass' latest is a grim and often moving hybrid, a post-apocalyptic climate change novel with a doomed domestic idyll tucked inside.įrancesca is a renowned climate change activist, ever more in demand as her bleak, accurate predictions earn her a reputation as a Cassandra.
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