The Water That May Come

The downstairs room at Lark Books in Lincoln was already warm with bookish expectation when the audience reverberated with a low, knowing laugh. On the very day Amy Lilwall was formerly launching her novel The Water That May Come the first named UK storm of the 2025 season, Storm Amy, barrelled its way across the country’s weather maps.

It was the kind of coincidence publicists dream about and authors dread – too on-the-nose to mention, too irresistible to ignore. In my mind it was the kind of fortuitous occasion when art, life and the elements fall into poetic alignment.

Inside, 40 people and a table stacked with freshly printed paperbacks, while outside rain needled the windows, a ready-made metaphor for a book that asks us to measure ourselves against waters that may (or may not) rise.

The evening was guided by Robert Weston, Lilwall’s creative writing colleague at the University of Lincoln, who set a generous tone. He opened with the book’s audacious prologue – told from the point of view of a ‘personified’ volcano – and praised the novel’s “writerly” confidence.

Lilwall, candid and quick to deflate her own mystique, described the prologue as a “prettified info-dump”, before explaining how the science had shifted in development. The idea first clung to the Canary Islands but an editor’s nudge and further research pulled the scenario to Iceland, where warming and glacial rebound render volcanic unrest more than just a gothic flourish. The move matters because it turned a what-if disaster premise into something more contemporary – ‘cli-fi’, if you can cope with that term. And, crucially, made it more political.

That doubleness – the volcano as a foreboding, scene setting character against the background of the climate crisis – runs through the novel’s preoccupations with The Water That May Come tracking four people as Britain looks seawards and flinches. 

Pinko, a rich heir who mistakes decadence for a plan; Jane, a veterinary nurse from a two-up, two-down who is thinking fast because circumstances give her no other choice; Ashleigh, her teenage daughter on the cusp of motherhood; and Gavin, a young artist whose hunches are humble and human-scale.

What gives the book its bite is not apocalypse-as-a-spectacle but pressure-as-a-test. Lilwall is less interested in the bang than in the slow tightening of rules and norms that precede it – the grey zone where everyone is still watching EastEnders and eating beans on toast while new forms of bureaucracy quietly harden around them.

She spoke about “intimacy laws” that haunt the book’s world: couples seeking to migrate are compelled to have intercourse in front of a jury to prove their relationship is “real”. It’s an absurdist idea – she cites the spirit of Lanthimos’s The Lobster – but offers it in deadly seriousness as a mirror to the way asylum processes already strips people naked, demanding testimony of trauma as an admission fee. The extremity shocks precisely because it feels like an extrapolation of something we live with today and forces us into the uncomfortable subjunctive of her title.

Migration is the engine not just backdrop decor for this story. One of Lilwall’s neat reversals is to flip the current right-wing Channel rhetoric by making refugees of Britons and then following the moral and domestic triage that results. Class is the fault line – Pinko has options money can buy; Jane has relationships and wits with little margin for error. The gap between a Tunbridge Wells mansion and a council house in Sittingbourne, Kent, isn’t just scenery, it’s what determines who gets on which boat (or helicopter) and at what cost.

When Rob recalled a line he loved, “Feminism leaves Jane like a stolen soul” you could feel the room register how the book sticks pins in the soft language of principle. Principles are easy in peacetime but much harder when water laps at the door.

Lilwall was frank about the imaginative leap required to write Jane, a character far from her own demographic experience. She didn’t do “fieldwork” in the extractive sense (no interviews to stitch into authenticity). Instead, she built Jane from careful observation and empathy, and – crucially – left space for Jane’s self-awareness. The character knows what she’s doing, knows the compromises and self-bargains she’s making, and the book refuses to judge her for surviving.

A reading from the opening chapter threaded humour through the gloom, and the crowd – students, colleagues, readers – was up for it. A running joke about Paris, the dog (spoiler alert: yes, the dog makes it), gave the evening a pressure-release valve. But even the comedy slides against the grain of the themes.

In a conversation about whether anyone, faced with the end of things, would shrug and “drink all the champagne”, Lilwall argued her characters can’t so easily shed who they are. Even when the world is tilting, habits, loyalties and self-concepts resist – and that friction is where novelistic interest lives.

Publishing, too, is part of the climate of a book, and Lilwall was generous about the process. The Water That May Come is from Manchester-based Fly on the Wall Press, a small imprint with an appetite for political fiction and a knack for turning nimbleness into care.

The book was only accepted for publication in September 2024 and its release this October was speedy by industry standards, going through three rounds of development edits and two rounds of proofs, according to Lilwall.

That blend of speed and rigour shows on the page – a four-character chorus that is ambitious in structure but never confusing; a prose clarity that lets the ethical puzzles shine. The press’s own positioning is plain: political fiction with feminist and quirky undertones, social action in the bloodstream and carbon-neutral production – northern publishing with a point of view.

If you’re looking for a tidy category on your bookshelf, the publisher offers “a rare blend of speculative fiction and literary realism”, in the lineage of The High House and The Last Day. But Lilwall’s novel also feels like it belongs to a different, increasingly visible slot: climate novels about the bit before. Not the catastrophe itself but the time when catastrophe is a credible rumour. Not the fire or flood but the weeks before when people move photo albums upstairs and quietly price life rafts.

The book’s fundamental question – what do you do before the worst happens? – is political because our answers have consequences beyond ourselves. It’s also intimate, because those answers are made one kitchen conversation at a time.

In that sense, the Lincoln Book Festival and Lark Books was exactly the right venue for this launch. Independent bookshops are civic spaces as much as retail rooms, places where a town or city rehearses how it will talk to itself. Watching students lean forward during the Q&A to puzzle over voice, process, responsibility – and to ask how you keep faith with a project over eight years – you could feel the wider frame of the UK migration debate refracted through crafted questions rather than sound-bite slogans. Literature won’t settle policy, but it can make the policy personal enough to resist caricature.

Lilwall hinted, mischievously, at a sister novel – characters glimpsed here stepping forward elsewhere, Paris-the-dog included. The room perked up at the promise of “more naughtiness”, which felt right because the work of dark times needn’t always be sombre. And if there’s a line that does the best job of bottling the book’s moral weather, it’s the one Fly on the Wall chose to trail with its publicity: “In a future where we all may become refugees, how far would you go to stay afloat?”

Walking out at the end of the evening – leaving Lilwall grinning with relief aside a dwindling stack of first edition paperbacks – the rain had eased to a fine mist. It felt like the right departure note for a launch about imminence: no drama, just a change you notice on your skin the second you step into it.

The evening had made me think again about the soft power of fiction, where it dares to be timely without being didactic. If the migration debate in Britain is too often shouted across the gap between myth and data, between right and left, Lilwall’s approach is to tighten the shot, to make the choice a reader’s and to make the river a street you know.

The Water That May Come is a novel of thresholds: between land and sea, between safety and risk, between who you think you are and what you do next. It is also, thankfully, a book with a sense of the ridiculous that keeps you human.

On a night when a namesake storm knocked on the windows, Amy Lilwall offered the kind of story that respects both your intelligence and your fear. The water, like the future, “may come” but the better question is: who do we become while we’re waiting?

  

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

ISBN: 9781915789440
RRP: £12.99

Heat, wealth and denial

 

The Earth is on fire – literally and politically. From southern Europe to the American West, from South Asia to the UK, we are witnessing heatwaves, floods and systemic breakdowns. These are not outliers but the new normal.

And still, somehow, we go on pretending.

The Guardian's recent opinion headline – “Why do we pretend heatwaves are fun and ignore the brutal, burning reality?” – poses exactly the right question. Inflatable paddling pools, rooftop cocktails and weather presenters chirping about “glorious sunshine” are still our cultural defaults, even as climate systems tip dangerously toward the edge.

This dissonance is a form of climate denial. Not the outright rejection of science but a quieter more pervasive refusal to let the facts fully alter how we live, lead or legislate.

Adaptation limits

This week (23 June 2025), the UK’s Climate Change Committee released its latest review, warning that Britain remains dangerously unprepared for what lies ahead. "We are not resilient to the changes that are already happening," the report states. And worse, the pace of adaptation is slowing just when it needs to accelerate.

While the report argues that the UK could still reach net zero by 2050, it warns that this alone will not protect the country from flooding, heatwaves and food system instability. "Adaptation is as important as mitigation," the committee notes, "and right now we’re failing on both fronts."

This echoes what climate scientist Tim Lenton told The Guardian in a powerful interview entitled 'This is a fight for life'.

Lenton, an expert on climate tipping points, warns that cascading climate failures are not decades away – they are unfolding now.

What may once have been theoretical risks are becoming visible ruptures in our weather systems, water cycles and social infrastructure.

"We are in a planetary emergency," he declares bluntly. "But there’s still agency. We have a meaningful chance to turn this around – if we act."

Tipping points and privilege

Among the most chilling parts of Lenton’s interview is his critique of how the wealthy attempt to insulate themselves from climate impacts – by migrating, insuring, air conditioning or building physical barriers.

"People with financial resources are trying to buy resilience," he says. "In the long run this is not a crisis that respects wealth."

We saw that vividly in 2023’s flash floods in Germany, and again in recent Canadian wildfires and southern US droughts. Critical infrastructure collapses. Water fails. Food prices spike. Insurance markets break down. And while the vulnerable suffer first, no one is untouched

In short, climate chaos is not a distant threat to people in far away lands. It is here, now, and it is coming for the systems we all rely on.

Fiction as foresight

As someone who has turned to fiction rooted in climate science as a means of conveying urgency, I see this means of storytelling as a way to make the different facets of climate change more real. 

My forthcoming novel, Flood Waters Down, imagines a near-future Britain fractured by flooding, individual greed and collective disorientation.

The geography is drawn from Climate Central’s real-world sea level projection tools. The characters – though fictional – face choices rooted in policy inertia, displacement and social fragmentation.

They live in a country that pretended, for too long, that it could “cope” its way through climate change.

If that sounds familiar, it's because it is.

In the same week, CNN in the United States detailed the now-undeniable link between human-caused global warming and record-breaking heatwaves across the globe. "We are seeing extremes that scientists didn’t expect until the 2030s or 2040s," one researcher noted. "We’ve accelerated the timeline of risk."

Heat isn’t neutral

Extreme heat is not just uncomfortable. It kills. It erodes productivity, threatens food security and degrades mental health. It disproportionately affects the elderly, the poor, outdoor workers and those living in poorly insulated or densely built environments.

And yet, in much of the UK’s mainstream media and politics, heat is still largely treated as a lifestyle issue, not a public health or systemic risk.

Another recent editorial in The Guardian put it plainly: "We must stop thinking of climate breakdown as a future issue. We need to build national readiness now, or we’ll let everyday life keep breaking down."

That means investing in climate-resilient infrastructure, yes. But it also means telling new stories – stories that prepare people not just with facts, but with frameworks for feeling, thinking and acting differently.

Inflection point

The convergence of science, policy warnings, media coverage and lived experience is no coincidence. We are in an inflection moment – when the consequences of inaction are visible yet the possibilities of change and adaptation remain open.

Whether we respond with courage or complacency will define more than just the future of emissions. It will define the kind of society we become and the kind of world we leave.

In Flood Waters Down, the waters rise – and so does something else. Its characters and the challenges they face aren’t far from us. They’re just a few degrees – and decisions – ahead.

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 Flood Waters Down – for further details contact Clive Simpson

Where data meets dystopia

 

Future flood risk areas across Eastern England. (Climate Central)

I’ve always been fascinated by maps. Even in today’s world of satellite navigation and real-time updates, there’s something deeply reassuring about unfolding a trusty Ordnance Survey chart.

But whether modern digital or old-style printed, these visual guides can reveal far more than just the lay of the land. They hint at stories – past, present and future. 

Look long enough and you begin to see not only how the world is today but how it might be reshaped in the years ahead.

One such projection, hosted by Climate Central – a non-profit organisation of scientists and journalists that researches and communicates the impacts of climate change – powerfully illustrates how the world’s coastlines are gradually being redrawn.

Much of eastern England’s low-lying coast is a prime example of the land that will be changed by current rates of global warming and sea level rise.

Zoom into the coastline around The Wash, the Lincolnshire Fens and parts of Norfolk and Cambridgeshire, for example, and the familiar low-level terrain begins to vanish beneath a soft wash of red.

In near-future years, areas known for agriculture, an unassuming rural life and their historic market towns are increasingly shown as sitting in high flood risk zones – places where the sea will make ever more frequent inroads.

In technical terms the scenario depicted by Climate Central is based on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2021 median projection under the SSP3-RCP7.0 pathway, which suggests global sea levels could rise by an average of over half a metre by 2050.

Whilst this may not sound catastrophic in itself, the impact on low-lying coastal and inland regions such as the Fens could be profound.

Sea floods will become more frequent and, in some places, just a few more inches of water could turn temporary storm surge flood zones into permanent wetland or, worse still, uninhabitable zones.

It’s a slow-motion disaster already moving forwards apace - and it’s also the starting point for the world I build in my forthcoming novel.

Personal and urgent

Flood Waters Down is set in a dystopian near-future Britain, where the eastern lowlands have been severely impacted by rising sea levels, repeated flooding and  climate-driven societal change.

Much of the action unfolds in and around a transformed Fens region – a landscape made unfamiliar not just by water also but by the consequences of ecological neglect and authoritarian responses.

I didn’t choose the setting by accident. I grew up here and live not far from these primal lands. I know their moods, the smell of the fields, the rhythm of life in mile after mile of flat country where sky and soil focus the conversation.

This familiarity made the writing more personal – and more urgent. When you imagine your own region unravelling at the edges, fiction quickly becomes something more than entertainment. It’s like a window on the future.

In recent years, climate fiction – or “climate-inflected sci-fi” – has matured into a serious literary genre. It’s not about predicting precisely what might happen, but rather projecting emotional, social and political truths through the lens of imagination.

That’s the intention behind Flood Waters Down – to extrapolate not just environmental conditions but the human responses that arise in their wake.

Map reading

The Coastal Risk Screening Tool developed by Climate Central uses peer-reviewed data and elevation models to simulate areas likely to fall below future annual flood levels.

The default setting projects flood risk for the year 2050 by combining anticipated sea level rise with the statistical height of a typical annual coastal flood. This leads to a visualisation of areas where permanent or frequent inundation may occur, reflecting  land, in the absence of any flood protection infrastructure, that would be below water during an annual flood event in 2050.

As a result, it can add risk to areas that may currently be defended in one way or another – and act as a reminder that such protections require continuous investment, maintenance and political will to remain effective.

The visual simplicity of the tool belies its complexity. You can explore different scenarios and time frames using the year slider and other settings – including more severe flood probabilities or the projected impacts of sea level rise alone.

Disappearing towns

In the SSP3-RCP7.0 scenario – considered a “regional rivalry” pathway with moderate-to-high emissions and limited climate policy cooperation – vast swathes of Lincolnshire and the East Anglian coast appear increasingly vulnerable.

Towns like Boston, Holbeach, Wisbech, King’s Lynn and Spalding are among those at greater risk. Crucially, it’s not just coastal settlements but deep inland areas at sea level, historically reliant on pumps and drainage defences, that face the greatest exposure.

In Flood Waters Down, I take this reality and extend it into the future. Civil infrastructure has failed, government priorities have shifted and certain regions are no longer considered worth defending or restoring.

People who stay behind – by choice, by poverty or protest – form fragmented communities, surviving in marginal conditions and living outside the protection of what remains of the state.

This isn’t science fiction in the conventional sense. It’s a narrative echo of today’s policy drift and tomorrow’s possible consequences.

We’ve been here before

The Fens, of course, have always lived with water. Historically marshland, they were systematically drained between the 17th and 20th centuries to create some of the UK’s most fertile farmland. That reclamation was a triumph of engineering, ambition and hubris – the human desire to master nature.

But as climate change accelerates and sea levels rise, this delicate equilibrium is under threat. According to the UK Environment Agency, around 620,000 properties in England are currently at risk from coastal flooding.

The same organisation warns that parts of Eastern England may be impossible to defend indefinitely without major adaptation or relocation strategies.

Add to that the social and political dimensions – resource stress, forced migration and increased surveillance – and you begin to glimpse the world Flood Waters Down inhabits.

Fiction as foresight

After many years writing as a journalist, I now also believe fiction has a vital role to play in climate discourse. Scientific data tells us what might happen; stories help us imagine what it could feel like. 

And in a time when climate anxiety is increasingly widespread – but often abstract or numbed – storytelling can make the intangible personal again.

The characters in Flood Waters Down are not heroes in the traditional sense. They’re ordinary people living in extraordinary times – facing moral compromise, loss and the persistent pull of memory. They resist erasure, they adapt and sometimes they fail. But above all, they bear witness.

Through them, I explore the many layers of the climate crisis, not just floods and nature, but governance, inequality, fear and the question of what kind of future we’re willing to fight for.

Flooding as a metaphor

When I began writing Flood Waters Down, I used flooding as metaphor – representing broader themes of collapse and disruption. But as I continued, and as the flood risk projections grew starker, I realised the metaphor was becoming real.

Sea levels are rising. Maps across the world are being redrawn. And governmental policy is either non-existent or still in the slow lane.

Climate Central’s map is a tool anyone can use to visualise what might be coming. My upcoming novel is a tool to feel it. 

Both are meant to spark conversation, reflection – and maybe, just maybe, preparation. Because the floodwaters aren’t just coming. In many places they’re already here. 

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Explore the map: Climate Central Coastal Risk Screening Tool

Flood Waters Down – for further details contact Clive Simpson