The High House
JESSIE GREENGRASS
(SWIFT PRESS, 288 PP, £14.99)
Tablet bookshop price £13.49 • Tel 020 7799 4064

This beautiful, troubling novel re-imagines for our turbulent times the Old Testament’s Great Flood and the building of the Ark. It draws on traditional apocalyptic imagery while also staking out its place in twenty-first-century territory. While its sharply observed details evoke the clarity and colour of medieval frescoes, and the precise, sculptural gestures of medieval theatre, they simultaneously reveal modern scientific facts. Prophets, such as the climate-change specialist Francesca, declaim their warnings via the internet. Saints, such as Francesca’s neighbour, Grandy, come disguised as kindly locals popping round to give a hand. God, as imagined by the child Pauly, is a lion who cares about saving an egrets’ nest.