Warning Signs: Award-Winning Novels and Nonfiction About Climate Change

Why it’s here: Shortlisted for the Nebula Award. In 2025, with society worn down by drugs, disease, violence and chronic water shortages, Lauren Olamina lives behind the walls of one of the last safe neighbourhoods outside Los Angeles. She suffers from hyperempathy - she feels the pain of others - and when her community can no longer protect her, she is forced onto the road north with a handful of refugees. Octavia E. Butler's novel feels more prophetic every year.

Perfect for: Readers who want the classic climate dystopia everyone keeps coming back to.

Why it’s here: Winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Bangkok is struggling to survive in a world after oil, with rising sea levels and mutations out of control - and with bio-terrorism turned into a tool for corporate profit. Paolo Bacigalupi's debut novel imagines the climate crisis and the biotech industry colliding.

Perfect for: Science fiction readers who want a dense, richly imagined future.

Why it’s here: Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. On a failing farm in rural Tennessee, a young wife and mother witnesses something she cannot explain - and her discovery draws in religious leaders, climate scientists, environmentalists and politicians, with her caught in the middle. Barbara Kingsolver's novel is about catastrophe, denial and how we choose what to believe.

Perfect for: Readers who want a warm, character-driven novel rather than a dystopia.

Why it’s here: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and shortlisted for the Booker. Alongside ours there is another world - vast, slow, interconnected and almost invisible to us: the world of trees. Richard Powers' novel unfolds in interlocking stories, from antebellum New York to the Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest, about a handful of people who learn to see that world and are drawn into its unfolding catastrophe.

Perfect for: Readers ready for a big, ambitious novel that changes how you look at a forest.

Why it’s here: Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. Lizzie works in a university library and, on the side, answers the letters sent to Hell and High Water, a doom-laden podcast run by her former mentor. Soon she is struggling to sound hopeful in her replies, and her obsession with people preparing for the end of the world begins to unsettle her life as a wife and mother. Jenny Offill's short, sharp novel is about living with climate dread.

Perfect for: Readers who want something short, funny and anxious - you can read it in an afternoon.

Why it’s here: Shortlisted for the National Book Award. Twelve children are stuck on a summer holiday at a lakeside mansion with parents who barely notice them. When a destructive storm hits the estate, the oldest decide to run away, leading the younger ones out into the chaos - and Eve, who tells the story, devotes herself to keeping her little brother safe. Lydia Millet's novel is a story of the generational divide.

Perfect for: Book clubs looking for a short novel with plenty to argue about.

Why it’s here: Shortlisted for the BSFA Award. Told through fictional eyewitness accounts, Kim Stanley Robinson's novel follows how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, post-apocalyptic world but a future that is almost upon us - and it is as interested in the politics and economics of fighting back as in the disasters.

Perfect for: Readers who want ideas and solutions, not just disaster.

Why it’s here: Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal and a finalist for the National Book Award. In a near-future Kolkata collapsing under food shortages, Ma, her small daughter and her elderly father are days away from joining her husband in America - until Ma's purse with their visas is stolen. Over one week, Megha Majumdar follows both Ma's search and the thief, Boomba, whose desperation to care for his own family drives him further and further.

Perfect for: Readers who want a gripping, human-scale story of the climate crisis.

Why it’s here: Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In Alaska's far north, climate change is not an abstraction: ice that should be solid gives way under whale hunters, and scientists cross the tundra measuring snow. Charles Wohlforth, a lifelong Alaskan, follows Indigenous hunters and researchers as they try to understand the same changing world in two very different ways.

Perfect for: Readers who want climate change seen from the place it hit first.

Why it’s here: Winner of the Royal Society Science Book Prize. What would one more degree of warming mean for the Earth - and two, three, up to six? Mark Lynas works through the science degree by degree to show what our planet and our civilisation would face if global warming carries on at its current pace.

Perfect for: Readers who want to understand what the warming numbers actually mean.

Why it’s here: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. There have been five mass extinctions in the last half a billion years; scientists are now watching a sixth. Elizabeth Kolbert blends field reporting with the history of ideas to tell the stories of a dozen species - from the Panamanian golden frog to the Sumatran rhino - some already gone, others on the edge.

Perfect for: The essential starting point - if you read one nonfiction book here, read this.

Why it’s here: Winner of the Royal Society Science Book Prize. Humans have changed the planet so much that scientists speak of a new age, the Anthropocene. Gaia Vince travelled the world to meet the people living on its front line - from artificial glaciers in the Himalayas and painted mountains in Peru to electrified reefs in the Maldives - and the extraordinary things they are doing to cope.

Perfect for: Readers who like travel writing and want to meet the people adapting right now.

Why it’s here: Shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award. Naomi Klein argues that the climate crisis cannot be solved within free-market ideology as it stands - and that cutting emissions on the scale needed could also be a chance to fix much of what is wrong with our economies and politics.

Perfect for: Readers who want the political argument - it's a manifesto, not a neutral survey.

Why it’s here: Shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Wetlands store huge amounts of carbon, and we have been draining them for centuries. Annie Proulx travels from the fens of 16th-century England to Canada's Hudson Bay lowlands, Russia's Great Vasyugan Mire and America's Okefenokee swamp to tell the story of their destruction and what it means for the climate.

Perfect for: Nature-writing lovers who want a short book on an overlooked part of the story.

Why it’s here: Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In May 2016 a wildfire overran a Canadian oil town and drove 90,000 people from their homes. John Vaillant tells the story of that fire and uses it to explore our long relationship with fire - and what it means in an ever hotter, more flammable world.

Perfect for: Readers who want a page-turner that reads like a thriller.

Why it’s here: Shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize. After more than four decades reporting from the front line of climate change and environmental recovery, Fred Pearce has found seven reasons for cautious hope - from nature thriving in unexpected places to rich societies approaching "peak stuff". A book to end on: it's not too late.

Perfect for: Anyone who needs a reason for hope after the rest of this list.