Flood

Monday

Neal Pollack

Don’t politicize the Texas flood

From our US edition

It’s early Monday morning here in Central Texas, and the rain just keeps on falling. Over the wettest weekend any of us can remember, water has saturated the ground and overflowed every culvert. Dozens are dead, an untold number of properties damaged. The drought is over, point taken. We surrender. Now we have to figure out who, if anyone, is at fault.  In the last few days, the blame has flowed faster and thicker than the raging muddy waters of the Guadalupe River. It started almost immediately on Friday morning, with a sickening torrent of anti-Texas vitriol from left-wing social media, the flip side of the horrible “God’s wrath” chatter we heard from the right during the Los Angeles fires.

Texas

Thursday

Madeleine Feeny

And then there were five: The High House, by Jessie Greengrass, reviewed

In 2009 Margaret Atwood published The Year of the Flood, set in the aftermath of a waterless flood, a flu-like pandemic that almost extinguishes human life. Twelve years ago such apocalyptic visions still felt speculative. Today, Jessie Greengrass’s new novel, The High House, imagining a near future in which civilisation is engulfed by an actual watery flood, does not. It feels chillingly inevitable. The author of a prize-winning short story collection and Sight, a novel shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2018, Greengrass grew up partly in Devon and lives in Berwick-upon-Tweed. Her affinity with the countryside permeates this book, in which nature is both sublime and implacable.