The Climate Fiction Prize 2025: the five shortlisted books reviewed by our experts

Five novels have been shortlisted for the 2025 Climate Fiction Prize. Our academics review the finalists ahead of the announcement of the winner on May 14.

And So I Roar by Abi Daré

Abi Daré’s poignant second novel, And So I Roar, charts the parallel stories of Tia, an environmental advocate, and Adunni, a Nigerian teenager first introduced in The Girl with the Louding Voice (2020).

Now under Tia’s care in Lagos, Adunni has escaped child marriage and domestic abuse.

When she returns to her village, Ikati, where she and other girls are blamed for the drought and face the threat of violence, the novel unravels long-held secrets. Daré masterfully explores how environmental crises intersect with gendered violence, showing how impoverished women disproportionately bear the burden of climate change.

And So I Roar highlights intergenerational, inter-ethnic and cross-class solidarity, celebrating the courage of women and girls who defy society’s expectations. It is a powerful testament to resilience, as women and girls confront injustice and find the strength to lift their voices and, finally, roar.

By Louisa Uchum Egbunike, associate professor in African literature

The Morningside by Téa Obreht

Obreht’s The Morningside is a quietly dazzling piece of climate fiction – more adjacent to our world than removed from it, and all the more unsettling for it.

Set in Island City, a place marked by an unnamed tragedy, the novel centres on Sil, an 11-year-old girl who moves into the Morningside apartment complex with her mother.

Both are climate refugees, though the novel wears this reality lightly – what matters more are the small acts of home-making, the search for belonging and the ghosts that travel with them. Magical realism is deftly handled here, interlaced with hints of folklore that feel entirely plausible within the book’s fragile ecology.

The Morningside is deeply readable – generous, tender and brimming with quiet unease. It never tips into bleakness, but its warnings are clear enough. “The things you had, the things you saw,” Sil’s mother tells us, “will probably be gone by the time [your children are] born.”

By Sam Illingworth, professor of creative pedagogies

Briefly Very Beautiful by Roz Dineen

Roz Dineen’s Briefly Very Beautiful immerses readers in a world that both is and is not a familiar fiction. Crisply written, in direct, unfussy prose, it is, at one level, a story of a woman, Cass, trying to protect her children as her relationship unravels.

At the same time, a parallel social collapse triggered by climate change puts the ordinary in an extraordinary frame.

Much of the effect of this novel comes from Cass’s utterly believable responses to what is taking place around her, her almost peripheral awareness of other people fleeing the city, her own craving for fresh air “like she’d craved things in pregnancy, with a scary gorging hunger”.

Briefly Very Beautiful is a novel brave enough to recognise that there is no simple, heroic response to some situations. That sometimes, the determination to live an ordinary life is the truly heroic course of action.

By Christopher Morash, professor of Irish writing

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Samantha Harvey’s Orbital skilfully exposes the human cost of space flight, set against the urgency of the climate crisis. While a typhoon of life-threatening proportions gathers across south-east Asia, six cosmonauts hurtle around Earth on the International Space Station.

Their everyday routine of tasteless food and laboratory work is in stark contrast to the awesome spectacle of the blue planet, oscillating between night and day, dark and light, where international borders are meaningless.

While they teach laboratory mice to orient themselves in micro-gravity, they rigorously document their own bodily functions to satisfy some “grand abstract dream of interplanetary life” away from “the planet held hostage by humans, a gun to its vitals”. These are humans, Harvey tells us, “with a godly view that’s the blessing and also the curse”. Harvey has written a novel for the end of the world as we know it. The hope it offers is that we might learn to know it differently.

By Debra Benita Shaw, reader in cultural theory

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

The best novels defy easy categorisation, and The Ministry of Time covers many genres: climate fiction, sci-fi, speculative fiction, romance, action.

It tells the story of a female civil servant who is a handler for one of five people plucked from history before their death. It was fun to imagine how today’s world would be perceived from various perspectives, including a zesty young lesbian woman from the 17th century, a shy young lieutenant from the first world war and a 19th-century naval officer.

The story adopts the usual dystopian tropes of a world that has destroyed itself through greed, power-seeking and over-indulgence. In the final plea to the reader not to let this terrible future unfold, the assumption is that if we’re scared enough, we’ll all give up red meat, stop flying and campaign for climate policies.

My research, and psychological studies of fear caution us that the response is just as likely to be voting for far-right leaders, marginalisation of innocent victims, and buying up all the toilet rolls. I loved this book, but to inspire greener behaviour, showing visions of what a sustainable society might look like if we did things right would be a welcome change.

By Denise Baden, professor of sustainable business

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The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.