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

Fighting for the Fens

 

The Fens of South Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire have always been precarious – a landscape engineered by human determination, machinery and hard labour.

Now, as ageing infrastructure meets rising seas and volatile weather, the vast area of low-lying land faces its gravest threat since it was drained in the 17th century.

According to a report this week on the Lincolnshire Live website (Jamie Waller, 29 September 2025), the county could be forced to “surrender the Fens” back to the sea unless billions of pounds are spent on new defences.

As someone who lives on the edge of the Fens, I read his account from Lincolnshire County Council’s Environment Committee with unease – it could almost have been lifted from the pages of my upcoming novel Flood Waters Down (to be published Spring 2026).

Amy Shaw, flood risk manager for the Environment Agency (EA), didn’t sugar-coat it. “The cost is likely to be billions, not millions,” she told councillors. “The problem will be here before 2100 – within the next 10 or 15 years we will need to have a clear direction.”

This is no longer a hypothetical dilemma for the future. Decisions made now will determine whether the Fens and low-lying lands of Lincolnshire remain habitable for future generations.

Breaking point
Most of the area’s pumping stations and sluices were commissioned in the 1960s and recent Environment Agency studies show what would happen if those pumps stopped: vast swathes of Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire would be under 1.5 metres of water.

Combine this with rising sea and tide levels, and it’s clear why the issue is urgent. Daniel Withnall, chief executive of the Black Sluice Internal Drainage Board, laid out the scale of the threat. “If we do nothing, we are surrendering the south of Lincolnshire – that’s how drastic it is,” he said.

The Fens 2100+ partnership (a consortium of local authorities and interested organisations) has begun preparing proposals to bid for government funding. But the scale of the ask is daunting and political priorities are often short-term.

Councillors at the meeting made no attempt to disguise the severity of the problem. Tom Ashton (Conservative) said: “I’m pleased our ambition to defend the Fens matches the ambition of our ancestors to create it. It will come down to money, and a huge amount of it. It’s unfortunate that river maintenance money is going down, not up.”

Raymond Whitaker (Reform UK Ltd) warned about the decrepit state of existing infrastructure: “If we have a couple of big storms, the pumping stations could break down and Lincolnshire could flood.”

And Ashley Baxter (Independent) brought both history and climate politics into the room, citing an ancestor who first came to the country as a refugee to help drain the Fens. “Now, four centuries later,” he warned, “climate change is the elephant in the room.”

Battling against nature
The Fens have never been entirely “won”. Every field, every straightened river and drainage channel is part of a centuries-long battle against water.

In dry summers, the black peat soils shrink and crack. In wet seasons, pumps groan under the strain while the North Sea, higher now than at any time in recent history, creeps upward year by year.

Locals know this instinctively. Farming families talk about the land “sitting on borrowed time.” And yet, the Fens are more than well-drained soil: they are one of the UK’s most productive agricultural regions. A third of the nation’s vegetables come from these fields.

Foreshadowing reality
When I began writing Flood Waters Down, my aim was to push the current fragility of the Fens into the future, imagining a scenario where sea defences are neglected, climate extremes accelerate and political will falters.

The novel explores the consequences for communities forced to adapt to flooded landscapes – some clinging on with technology, others turning to new ways of living. It’s a speculative narrative rooted in the science of climate change and infrastructure decay.

Blurring the lines
It’s rarely comfortable when fiction and reality come together. Reading the Lincolnshire Live report felt like opening a chapter of my own novel – except this time the decisions rest not with imagined characters but with government ministers, councillors, engineers and all of us who live in this landscape.

The Fens have always been a battleground between human ingenuity and nature. Four centuries ago, our ancestors chose ambition and succeeded. Today, the question remains: do we defend or retreat – or just prevaricate until nature decides for us?

To stand still is to gamble because, as Councillor Whitaker pointed out, one or two big storms could push fragile pumping stations past breaking point.

Perhaps this is the true value of stories like Flood Waters Down – to bring perspective and help us imagine potential consequences before they unfold. Either way, the clock is ticking.

Deadly secrets and dystopian fears

The title of this Newark Book Festival talk – Deadly Secrets and Dystopian Fears – could hardly have been more apt. 

In the intimate surrounds of the town’s National Civil War Centre, speculative thriller author Eve Smith took centre stage, joining crime writer Eva Björg Ægisdóttir for a compelling discussion hosted by Dr Tim Rideout. 

But from my perspective it was Smith’s chilling new novel The Cure that dominated the hour, offering a potent blend of science, ethics and imagined futures that now feel all too plausible.

As a writer immersed in my own climate-themed speculative fiction, I found Smith’s candour and insight both reassuring and unsettling. 

Here is someone working at the very edge of what fiction can do – holding up a mirror to the world as it is now, while asking what it might look like just one bad decision (or breakthrough) down the road.

A cure worse than the disease?
Smith’s latest novel (published this spring by Orenda Books) pivots on a discovery no less extraordinary than the mythical fountain of youth. 

Her protagonist, Ruth, stumbles upon a cure for ageing while researching a disease that killed her daughter. It's an accidental find – science as side effect – but one that is quickly hijacked by corporate ambition. 

The resulting gene therapy promises eternal youth but at catastrophic cost. A future where humanity can no longer die naturally demands grim sacrifices to keep the system functioning.

It’s this kind of premise – eerily speculative but firmly rooted in real-world science – that defines Smith’s work. Her books, from The Waiting Rooms to One and now The Cure, begin with a simple, terrifying “what if?” In this case: what if the cure for ageing arrived before we were ready to manage it?

Listening to Smith unpack the real-world science was a revelation. She spoke of biotech companies already offering unregulated gene therapies, of a Silicon Valley outfit called Ambrosia that sold young people’s plasma to ageing elites – what she chillingly dubbed “modern-day vampire science.” And yes, it actually happened. 

The longevity industry is no longer niche futurism, it’s a multi-billion-dollar beast and her thoughts mirrored my own on observation a visit to Milan in 2024 and recorded in “A writer’s imaginative eye”.

For speculative fiction writers, who dwell in the speculative margins of science, this is fertile territory. But it's also fraught with moral complexity. 

Smith’s approach stands out because she doesn’t just pose ethical dilemmas – she drills deep into their human consequences. Her dystopias aren’t all towering glass and techno-doom, they’re rooted in the mess and pain of family, grief, ambition and love.

Fiction as thought experiment
As Smith told the audience, writing is her form of therapy. She researches obsessively – not just to arm herself with facts but to interrogate their implications. 

“If only,” she noted, “our political systems could keep pace with our science.” 

It’s a familiar refrain for any of us exploring the gap between innovation and governance – particularly in a time when climate change, AI and bioengineering are all surging ahead with few brakes in sight.

One of the most powerful ideas from The Cure is the notion of transcendence – a euphemism for euthanasia at the age of 120, required to prevent societal collapse under the weight of the undying. 

It's an Orwellian twist on assisted dying, laced with dark satire. Smith described the “transcendence ceremony” as akin to a wedding with speeches, closure and celebration before the final curtain. It’s dystopian, yes, but presented with a sardonic grin that lands it with an emotional punch.

This blend of science and social commentary felt strikingly familiar as I thought about my own forthcoming novel Flood Waters Down. 

While Smith's lens is biotechnology, mine is climate collapse, but we’re walking similar paths – fictionalising truths we’re already too close to. The dystopia doesn’t feel like a warning so much as a reflection of what’s already beginning to manifest.

Building a believable tomorrow
What sets Smith apart is her approach to world-building. She maps out the political, environmental and social landscape of her imagined futures in early detail before shaping the story itself. 

It’s a technique I’ve increasingly adopted in my own work of fiction which I like to call a “history of the future”. World-building isn't just about dressing the set it's about structuring the story’s moral and logistical scaffolding.

In The Cure, this manifests in a bifurcated future. One legal, state-controlled rejuvenation programme, the other an elite, unregulated underground version for the wealthy and powerful. 

The inequities are stark. Living space is scarce. Green spaces have all but vanished. Young people face mounting costs and diminished opportunity, unless they sign up to the government’s strict longevity contract. 

It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. We’re already watching inter-generational tensions play out, already dealing with housing crises and resource limits. What Smith has done is project them forward.

There’s also a recurring motif in her books of mother-daughter dynamics – a personal anchor in the swirl of global-scale issues. 

“I always come back to family,” she said. “That’s where you feel the impact of everything.” 

In The Cure, Ruth’s grief and guilt are the emotional lynchpins of the plot. For Smith, and I suspect for many of us writing in the speculative space, the personal and political are almost indivisible.

Genre bending for real impact
Smith comfortably straddles speculative fiction and thriller territory – a tricky balance that requires both pace and philosophical depth. Her plots move fast but not at the expense of nuance. 

She cited The Handmaid’s Tale – still painfully relevant decades after publication – as a personal touchstone. That resonance is what she’s aiming for and, arguably, achieving. As an audience member noted, her books seem destined to be re-read in years to come with a dawning sense of “Oh, that’s now.”

What I appreciated most from the session was Smith’s humility about her own genre. Speculative fiction is often viewed as second-tier literature – too bleak, too geeky, too niche. 

But as both she and Dr Rideout pointed out, the genre’s roots go deep. HG Wells, George Orwell, Margaret Atwood – and I would add JG Ballard. These writers didn’t just predict the future they shaped how we think about the present. That’s the tradition new writers are stepping into.

Cure for complacency
Towards the end of the talk, Smith revealed she’s not quite done with genetics. Her next novel will explore the idea of parents engineered from scratch – designer biology meets parental trauma. 

She laughed, noting she just can’t seem to escape DNA. But perhaps that’s the point. We’re already entering a world where our biology, once fixed, is becoming malleable. The big question, however, isn’t just what’s possible. It’s who controls it and at what cost?

As someone preparing to release a speculative novel of my own, I left the session not just inspired but sharpened. Smith reminded me that dystopia isn’t all about doom. It’s about consequence. It’s about asking the hardest questions in a format people will engage with. 

And maybe, just maybe, it’s about getting readers to imagine something better by first showing them what might go wrong.

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Photo caption: Tim Rideout with authors Eve Smith-Eva (centre) and Bjorg Aegisdottir at Newark Book Festival, July 2025. 

Flood Waters Down is on the road to publication - further details contact Clive Simpson