On Monday, negotiators from around the world will convene in Belém, Brazil, for the 2025 United Nations climate conference, known as COP30. For at least two weeks, they will attempt to hash out an agreement to pull the planet back from the brink of what scientists call “tipping points”: when environmental destruction becomes irreversible.
In technocratic settings, the specter of climate disaster can seem distant—a future possibility that some combination of financial pledges and fine print could still mitigate. Literature isn’t as charitable, and contemporary novels often powerfully explore the long-term consequences of our disregard for the Earth. For some readers, digesting a fictional worst-case scenario can compel real-life political shifts; they don’t want the plot to become true.
We asked five novelists who write climate fiction for their own recommendations in the genre. Their consensus? Cli-fi, as it is often called, may no longer be a literary subset of its own. Climate change is a reality, and mainstream novels now treat it as such. COP30 will reveal whether diplomats feel a similar urgency.—Allison Meakem, associate editor
Pod: A Novel
Laline Paull (Pegasus Books, 272 pp., $26.95, February 2023)
Recommended by Amitav Ghosh, an FP Global Thinker and the author of the forthcoming book Ghost-Eye (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 336 pp., $29, June 2026)
I have long believed that the great literary challenge confronting writers and storytellers in this age of extreme environmental disruption is that of restoring voice and agency to non-human beings of every kind. This is a task that the British Indian writer Laline Paull confronts with extraordinary dexterity and assurance in her 2022 novel, Pod.
Through the journey of Ea, a spinner dolphin who feels like an outcast in her own community, Paull constructs a complex cetacean culture with its own social rituals, languages, and lore. This is a radical act of empathy that reenchants the deep sea, transforming it from a backdrop into a pulsating, sentient world whose fate is inextricably linked to our own.
Beyond its meticulous world-building, Pod is also a gripping ecological thriller. The idyllic, if fraught, rhythms of ocean life are brutally interrupted and disrupted by human interventions—the deafening roar of boats, ships, and sonar; the ghostly nets that trap and kill; and the relentless pollution that turns the water into a toxic soup. Paull frames these disruptions as a direct assault on a vibrant civilization, leaving the reader with a haunting sense of the tragedy unfolding beneath the waves.
The Vegetarian: A Novel
Han Kang (Hogarth, 208 pp., $18, August 2016)
Recommended by Jessi Jezewska Stevens, author of The Visitors (And Other Stories, 224 pp., $18.95, June 2022)
Two book covers
When I speak to policymakers, activists, and regulators, they tell me again and again that climate change is primarily a political and economic problem rather than a technological one. That is one reason I’m increasingly drawn to stories that emphasize the imagination traps of our consumer society—and peoples’ desires to escape the social and political systems that cause environmental degradation. The Vegetarian, by Nobel Prize winner Han Kang, perfectly captures this sense of protest.
On its surface, the novel is about Yeong-hye, a young housewife in Seoul who, to the great distress of her husband and family, suddenly becomes a vegetarian. Told from the perspectives of those around her, the book evolves into a meditation on the longing to commune with the natural world and to extricate oneself from systems of harm—and even, possibly, to transform into a photosynthesizing tree.
Meanwhile, the distress that Yeong-hye’s increasingly extreme choices cause her loved ones seems due less to their concerns over her health than to their discomfort with disrupting the status quo. Nothing magical or science fictional happens in the novel, yet its psychological portrait of Yeong-hye becomes increasingly surreal—echoing the eerie, seemingly ungovernable threats that climate change presents.
Mobility: A Novel
Lydia Kiesling (Crooked Media Reads, 368 pp., $18, August 2023)
Recommended by Megha Majumdar, author of A Guardian and a Thief (Knopf, 224 pp., $29, October 2025)
Two book covers
A novel that I don’t often see on lists of climate fiction, yet one that is rousing in its engagement with the oil and gas industry, is Lydia Kiesling’s Mobility. The book begins in Azerbaijan, where an American teenager growing up in a Foreign Service family learns about the economic ripple effects of Caspian Sea oil. The story moves to Texas as our teenager grows up, enters the workforce, and faces a quandary: How can someone work in the fossil fuel industry while holding on to their moral center?
The questions the novel presents are the questions we need to ask ourselves as we confront the climate crisis. What is the right way to live when our everyday entanglement with systems of extraction renders us complicit? What comforts are we willing to sacrifice? What harms will we inflict and accept to justify financial benefit?
Approaching the climate crisis through the narrative of one woman and her navigation of work life, social life, and moral life, Mobility is a fantastic examination of the choices we make and how they have planetary consequences.
Orbital: A Novel
Samantha Harvey (Grove Atlantic, 224 pp., $17, October 2024)
Recommended by Eric Puchner, author of Dream State (Doubleday, 448 pp., $28, February 2025)
Two book covers
I don’t think that climate fiction is speculative anymore, if it ever was. These days, it’s a matter of verisimilitude. A contemporary novel set in the 21st century that doesn’t mention climate change or barely acknowledges the weather—now that’s speculative! It would be like reading a novel set in 2025 that doesn’t mention how everyone is walking around with phones in their pockets. Yet climate-neutral novels exist, and lots are even billed as realism.
Partly for this reason, I loved Orbital by Samantha Harvey. It’s not a cli-fi novel, per se—it doesn’t contain an ounce of speculation—and yet it’s impossible to read it without thinking about the planet’s fragility and how our failure to protect it is, well, astronomically absurd. The novel has no plot to speak of; rather, it follows six astronauts on the International Space Station as they orbit the Earth 16 times, the number of orbits the station completes in a single day.
In some of the most jaw-droppingly beautiful passages I’ve read in a long time, Harvey defamiliarizes our home planet and allows us to see it as if for the first time, as something small and rare and miraculous, a cosmic accident that’s impossible to take for granted. And since the astronauts see a new dawn and dusk every 90 minutes, time is sped up sixteen-fold, creating a sense of desperate urgency.
If only we could stop circling, Harvey seems to suggest, and absorb what the Earth is trying to tell us.
The Swan Book: A Novel
Alexis Wright (Washington Square Press, 320 pp., $18.99, January 2018)
Recommended by Madeleine Thien, author of The Book of Records (W.W. Norton & Company, 368 pp., $28.99, May 2025)
Two book covers
In Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book, the earth is a fallen world of drought, floods, bombings, forced displacement, unbreathable air, and leaders bent on making apocalyptic decisions. Here we meet a girl, Oblivia, who is born in the swamp—an impoverished place that, for those who call it home, is also paradise. She is cared for by Bella Donna, a refugee who has survived extinction, and the Harbour Master, who manages a mountain of sand. These are just two unforgettable figures in a novel bursting with life.
The Swan Book follows Oblivia on an odyssey across Australia and Indigenous homelands, through desert and tundra, lowlands and city. We see a world in which vast numbers of people have become climate refugees cast into the sea; the “living museum of another time” is preserved in the arid desert; and flowers seem a “fragment of life from another era.”
Refusing or unable to speak, Oblivia absorbs knowledge from stars, grass owls, swans and rivers, from the dwelling places of Aboriginal stories and ancient song cycles, from an old eucalyptus tree, from ancestors and neighbors—a shared library made of the world itself.
The Swan Book is concerned with sovereignty over one’s life and one’s mind. Glorious, funny, and wise, it is also beautiful: “In the darkness with a dying fire, they waited for the final moment when the earth opened the spinifex grassland abodes and the hands of the spiritual ancestor released the owls like pollen into the skies,” Wright writes.
The result is a rare creation—a novel that is monumental, unsparing, and loving. “I am trying to write at scale to meet the scale of what’s happening,” Wright said at the Edinburgh Book Festival in August. “We are past writing about us as individuals. It’s more than that. We have a lot of responsibility to what is happening and to what’s ahead.”
