“THE Los Angeles megafire... began life as four separate fires... hydrants went dry, and the fire leaped from unprotected home to unprotected home until entire neighbourhoods went up, and the firefighters were forced to retreat.” The evacuation of the city was ordered. “The sound was deafening, a freight train roar. Trees candling, grasses smouldering,” noted one eyewitness.

This isn’t a news report about the fires that ravaged Los Angeles in January but a terrifyingly prescient passage from Stephen Markley’s astonishing 2023 novel The Deluge (Simon & Schuster, £17.99). Nearly 900 Bible-thin pages long, it’s a beast of a book. As well as being a blisteringly brilliant read, I can confidently say it’s one of the most important books I’ve ever read.

With the action stretching from 2013 to the late 2030s – Los Angeles burns to the ground in 2031 – Markley’s magnum opus follows a cast of characters as the United States and the wider world confronts the ever worsening climate and ecological crisis. There is Tony Pietrus, a curmudgeonly scientist trying to raise the alarm, charismatic climate activist Kate Morris, and Ashrin, a neurodivergent mathematician/government adviser, along with a radicalised eco-saboteur, an advertising executive, and an actor turned power-hungry religious zealot.

It’s cl-fi (climate fiction) but very much grounded in familiar politics. Those pushing for radical action to reverse, or at least temper, the environmental carnage are repeatedly thwarted by corrupt politicians, powerful vested interests and rising authoritarianism. “This it seems to me is all starkly realistic,” climate philosopher Rupert Read recently wrote about The Deluge. “It is in fact the very story of our time, writ larger. Climate politics and climate action have evidently had little success.”

However, it’s far from being all doom and gloom. As Read also notes: “The really exciting thing about Markley’s book is the way it finally succeeds in imagining breaking the logjam on climate action.” There is lots of food for thought about how activists and society today might navigate global overheating. The inspirational Morris sets up Fierce Blue Fire, a resilient and influential social movement to force the government into action. 

The group establishes Outposts throughout the US – co-operative community projects that educate people about urban farming, permaculture, carbon sequestration and encourage voter registration. Could something similar be set up today in the UK? 

Elsewhere, Ashrin writes detailed policy proposals “to avoid social chaos stemming from high food prices and growing famines,” including curbing speculation in the commodities markets, taxing meat consumption and ending the commercial pet industry.

[[{"fid":"75464","view_mode":"inlineleft","fields":{"format":"inlineleft","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Amitav Ghosh, 2011. Credit: Innisfree987","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"inlineleft","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Amitav Ghosh, 2011. Credit: Innisfree987","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false}},"attributes":{"alt":"Amitav Ghosh, 2011. Credit: Innisfree987","class":"media-element file-inlineleft","data-delta":"1"}}]]The Deluge is just one of many recent books to take seriously Amitav Ghosh’s 2016 challenge to novelists to engage with the collapsing climate.

US sci-fi author Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2017 book New York 2140 (Orbit, £10.99) is set in a permanently inundated Big Apple, while his 2020 novel The Ministry For The Future (Orbit, £10.99) is similar in scope and ambition to The Deluge. The opening account of a heatwave in India that kills more people than “the entirety of the first world war” has rightly been singled out as one of the most powerful pieces of prose on the climate crisis. 

And let’s not forget US writer Richard Powers. His 2018 book The Overstory (Penguin, £9.99) is a colossal, multigenerational masterpiece that explores our relationship with trees (trust me, it’s much more interesting than it sounds), while his 2021 novel Bewilderment (William Heinemann, £18.99) directly addresses the climate and ecological crisis via a widowed astrobiologist and his nine-year-old son. In Playground (Penguin, £20), published last year, Powers turns his attention to humanity’s connection to the oceans, though I haven’t got round to reading this yet.

Of course, there are UK novels which have engaged with the ramifications of climate breakdown, including John Lanchester’s dystopian The Wall (Faber, £9.99), The End We Start From (Picador, £9.99) by Megan Hunter and Jessie Greengrass’s The High House (Swift Press, £8.99), which is set in a flooded East Anglia. Apparently Ian McEwan’s forthcoming novel What We Can Know (Jonathan Cape, £20) is set in 2119 with Britain an archipelago, after the nation’s lowlands are submerged by rising tides.

Speaking at the 2014 National Book Awards, US author Ursala K Le Guin emphasised the power of literature. “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings,” she noted. “Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”

For “capitalism” and “the divine right of kings” also read “the climate crisis.” All the books mentioned above underline the existential threat we face and help us come to terms with what this means for everyone alive today and future generations. And at their best they imagine how we might resist and change our “inescapable” status quo, suggesting ways forward to both address and live within the deteriorating climate.

The immense narrative sweep of The Deluge also delivers a crucial insight: what has been termed the climate emergency will, in reality, be a decades, probably centuries, long epic struggle against the most powerful interests in the world. There will be many defeats. Which means there will have to be many wins too.