Jessie Greengrass spent her childhood in London and Devon. She studied philosophy in Cambridge and now lives in Berwick-upon-Tweed, Northumberland, with her partner and children. Her collection of short stories, An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It, won the Edge Hill Prize and Somerset Maugham Award. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, Sight, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. The High House is her most recent novel.
At Publishers Weekly Greengrass tagged nine haunting postapocalyptic novels, including:
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. ButlerRead about the other entries on the list.
Butler’s novel is set in 2024, and this date’s proximity to ours does nothing to ameliorate the sense that it’s becoming more relevant astime passes. In a failed state version of America, water is scarce and safety the preserve of the rich; for the overwhelming majority, survival is a matter of choosing between wage slavery, scavenging, and, for the very poorest, cannibalism. Despite this it’s a profoundly hopeful book, centred on the transformative power of care. Travelling north from California in search of relative safety its young narrator, Lauren Olamina, grasps her way towards a new philosophy, and, as she does so, gathers around her a small band of followers who find solace in their companionship.
Parable of the Sower is among Liz Harmer's five works involving weird, unsettling isolation.
--Marshal Zeringue
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