Inspired by the stories of the curators in Iraq and Leningrad who worked to protect their collections from war, Eiren Caffall’s All the Water in the World is both a meditation on what we save from collapse and an adventure story—with danger, storms, and a fight for survival. Narrator Eunice Wong imbues each character with tenderness while also conveying their gritty determination as they seek a new life in a world forever altered by climate change.

The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica, author of the global sensation Tender Is the Flesh, is a searing, dystopian tale about the climate crisis, ideological extremism, and the tidal pull of our most violent, exploitative instincts. This is another unforgettable novel from a master of feminist horror.

A young boy and his older sisters find themselves suddenly and utterly alone, orphaned in an abandoned fishing village. Their food supplies dwindling, they set out across a breathtaking yet treacherous wilderness in search of the last of their people. At once a sweeping survival story, an epic of the distant future, and a postapocalyptic vision of hope and optimism, The Ancients weaves a multilayered narrative about human resilience, hope, and stewardship of our world for future generations.

An eco-thriller with teeth, T. C. Boyle’s Blue Skies is at once a tragicomic satire and a prescient novel that captures the absurdity and “inexpressible sadness at the heart of everything.” There’s more than meets the eye in this compulsive family drama. Lurking beneath the banal façade of 21st-century California and Florida is a caricature of materialist American society that doubles as a prophetic warning about our planet’s future.

A singular achievement, The Deluge is a once-in-a-generation novel that meets the moment as few works of art ever have. It’s long (very long) and has an impressively big multi-cast of narrators to match—including so many favorite voices. From the Gulf Coast to Los Angeles, the Midwest to Washington, DC, the story unfolds against a stark backdrop of accelerating chaos as each character strives to summon courage, galvanize a nation, and find wild hope in the face of staggering odds.

Told in four parts—power, water, light, and time—The Light Pirate mirrors the rhythms of the elements and the sometimes quick, sometimes slow dissolution of the world as we know it. It is a meditation on the changes we would rather not see, the future we would rather not greet, and a call back to the beauty and violence of an untamable wilderness.

How High We Go in the Dark is Sequoia Nagamatsu’s spellbinding and profoundly prescient debut that follows a cast of intricately linked characters over hundreds of years as humanity struggles to rebuild itself in the aftermath of a climate plague—a daring and deeply heartfelt work of mind-bending imagination. It’s a story about the resilience of the human spirit, our infinite capacity to dream, and the connective threads that tie us all together in the universe.

Perched on a sloping hill, set away from a small town by the sea, the High House is safe from the rising water that threatens to destroy the town and that has, perhaps, already destroyed everything else. But for how long? A searing story that takes on parenthood, sacrifice, love, and survival under the threat of extinction, The High House is an emotionally precise novel about what can be salvaged at the end of the world.

Told in prose as clear as a spring-fed creek, Damnation Spring is an intimate, compassionate portrait of a family whose bonds are tested and a community clinging to a vanishing way of life. An extraordinary story of the transcendent, enduring power of love—between husband and wife, mother and child, and longtime neighbors. It's an essential novel for our times.

Told from the perspective of a generation of children and the family of a girl named Thula who grows up to become a revolutionary, How Beautiful We Were is an exploration of what happens when the reckless drive for profit, coupled with the ghost of colonialism, comes up against one community’s determination to hold on to its ancestral land and a young woman’s willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of her people’s freedom.

The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, postapocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us—and in which we might just overcome the extraordinary challenges we face. With an amazing multi-cast, listening is a transcendent experience.

Told by a Brooklyn librarian who picks up a side job with a futurist podcast called "Hell and High Water," Weather is about many things: climate change, contemporary dread, the surprising savagery of domestic life, the fascinating characters you meet in libraries. What it isn’t is a traditional narrative with a neat, propulsive plot. Written in fragmented, impressionist vignettes and impeccably voiced by Cassandra Campbell, this is one you’ll want to dedicated some focused listening time to—all the better to have its sentences pleasingly burned into your brain for years to come.

Andrew Krivak’s The Bear is a methodical, evocative, and magical story. Drifting in and out of parables, myths, and the fluid language of the natural world, it somehow never feels lost. In narrator Eric Jason Martin’s steady, almost melodious narration, at first you feel like you have entered a fantastical field manual where profound questions of human nature are unearthed. But what you find yourself fiercely following is a young girl coming to terms with harsh realities and a heritage of grief that is widely relatable, and deeply moving.

Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island is a beautifully realized novel that spans space and time. It is the story of a world on the brink, of increasing displacement and unstoppable transition. But it is also a story of hope, of a man whose faith in the world and the future is restored by two remarkable women.

The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late 20th-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. As one listener put it, “This majestic novel reminds us that we are not apart from Nature but are a part of Nature, and our survival may depend on our collective realization of that reality.”

Omar El Akkad’s audacious and powerful debut novel is about a second American Civil War, a devastating plague, and one family caught deep in the middle. It's a story that asks what might happen if America were to turn its most devastating policies and deadly weapons upon itself. Narrator Dion Graham's performance is masterful as always. His smooth, measured delivery is a welcome guide through this chaotic, dark story.

One of Margaret Atwood’s favorite works of speculative fiction, The Water Knife, in her words, is: “A 'climate fiction,' among other things. Yes, there will be water wars. And there will be enforcers, strong men, assassins … A 'water knife' is a hired gun for big water interests. We follow one of these on his skullduggericious rounds (I made that word up, but it’s not too shabby), as he slogs through the mud of necessity towards some kind of revelation. Philip Marlowe on speed, with water as blue gold.”

Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Octavia E. Butler paints a stunning portrait of an all-too-believable near future. As with Kindred and her other critically acclaimed novels, Parable of the Sower skillfully combines startling visionary and socially realistic concepts. Narrator Lynne Thigpen's melodious voice will hold you spellbound throughout this compelling parable of modern society.

With breathtaking command of her shocking material, and with her customary sharp wit and dark humor, Margaret Atwood projects us into an outlandish yet wholly believable realm populated by characters who will continue to inhabit our dreams long after the last chapter. This is Atwood at the absolute peak of her powers.