The High House: A Novel

By Jessie Greengrass

Shortlisted for the 2021 Costa Novel Award

In this powerful, highly anticipated novel from an award-winning author, four people attempt to make a home in the midst of environmental disaster.

Perched on a sloping hill, set away from a small town by the sea, the High House has a tide pool and a mill, a vegetable garden, and, most importantly, a barn full of supplies. Caro, Pauly, Sally, and Grandy are safe, so far, from the rising water that threatens to destroy the town and that has, perhaps, already destroyed everything else. But for how long?

Caro and her younger half-brother, Pauly, arrive at the High House after her father and stepmother fall victim to a faraway climate disaster—but not before they call and urge Caro to leave London. In their new home, a converted summer house cared for by Grandy and his granddaughter, Sally, the two pairs learn to live together. Yet there are limits to their safety, limits to the supplies, limits to what Grandy—the former village caretaker, a man who knows how to do everything—can teach them as his health fails.

A searing novel that takes on parenthood, sacrifice, love, and survival under the threat of extinction, The High House is a stunning, emotionally precise novel about what can be salvaged at the end of the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribner
• Release date: Jan 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9781982180133

Jessie Greengrass

Jessie Greengrass spent her childhood in London and Devon. She studied philosophy in Cambridge and now lives in Berwick-upon-Tweed, Northumberland, with her partner and children. Her collection of short stories, An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It, won the Edge Hill Prize and Somerset Maugham Award. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, Sight, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. The High House is her most recent novel.

Book preview

Cover: The High House, by Jessie Greengrass

Brave, Important, and Exquisitely Written.

—Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend and What Are You Going Through

The High House

A Novel

Jessie Greengrass

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The High House, by Jessie Greengrass, Scribner

Who sang, sea takes,

brawn brine, bone grit.

Keener the kittiwake.

—Basil Bunting, Briggflatts

SALLY

In the morning, I wake earlier than the others. I climb out of bed in my jumper and my socks and I pull on my dressing gown, and after it my leggings and my boots. I go downstairs, and it is cold and dark and very quiet. My boots are beginning to go at the heels now, but I am trying to get this last winter out of them. My jumper and my leggings are frayed at the cuffs, and my dressing gown is an old blanket with holes cut out for the arms, because dressing gowns are a thing that Francesca didn’t think of—and although, between the three of us, we have a reasonable spread of skills, none of us can sew.

In the kitchen, I check the fire in the range, put fresh wood on the embers, and open up the vent until it burns. I pour the last of yesterday’s well water into the kettle and set it to boil, put dried mint leaves in a mug, make tea. I would have had coffee, once. I think this every morning. I think it, and then I think I can still catch the taste of it, but it’s been so long that it could be the taste of anything I am remembering. Milk. Mustard. Ham. They all bring the same flood of saliva into my mouth and the same sad twist into my chest.

Yesterday it rained and I didn’t do my coat up properly. Water got in at the collar and I spent the whole day damp, but today I can feel the chill of empty skies and so, I think, it will be clear. Outside, beyond the window, past the orchard, the sky is still full dark, but soon it will start to pale. I open the doors a crack and the air is fresh and cold, and it smells of salt. It will be an hour or more before the others are up. Caro sleeps badly, and often goes into Pauly’s room in the night, to lie on the mattress he keeps for her on the floor beside his bed. When he wakes, he will stay still so as not to disturb her. It is his own kind of peace, he says, to lie warm under the blankets in the dark with nothing to do. We take these small luxuries where we can, especially in winter.

You would think that with so much space—with the house and the garden, with the copse and the heath, the dunes and the beach, and only ourselves—it would be easy to be alone, but we are a knot. We cling. Each of us knows, at all times, where the others are, in the same way that we always know what time it is, telling it from some combination of light and shadow and our bones, so that it is only now, when it’s early, when Pauly and Caro are upstairs, asleep or still, and things have not quite begun, that I can feel as though I am by myself. I step out through the doors into the garden and, around me, silence spreads. I feel its emptiness. The air begins to lighten. Each breath hangs. I go down through the orchard, through the arch in the hedge, along the path and past the tide pool to where the river spreads, freed now of its cuts and embankments, its holdings and constraints, to make its own slow way into the sea—

Spring is coming. Its mnemonic is in the earth and in the branches, in the greening of the buds, the new spears poking among the dead reeds—and even while the cold still creeps into my clothes, I think of the warmth that will come to chase it soon. The grass is wet around my ankles. The air is still. From here I can see what is left of Grandy’s cottage, and below it the half-gone pub, the village green. The rusting arc of the swing frame rises like a monument. Each year, between water and neglect, less and less of the village remains. Grass grows in tufts from walls. Silt covers gardens. Crabs run across the broken cobbles of the road. I listen to the pip, pip of the oystercatchers and a solitary curlew’s call, and it seems strange to say it, but I am not unhappy. Dawn comes. I turn around and walk back the way that I have come, up the path, away from the river—toward the high house, which is my home.

1

CARO

The high house belonged to Francesca’s uncle first, but the uncle died not long after she and my father met. He had no children of his own, and so he left the house to Francesca, and the parcel of land that went with it, the orchard and the vegetable garden, the tide pool, the mill. For a long time, the house had been neglected. When I first came here, for summer holidays with Francesca and with father, damp patches spread around the corners of the downstairs rooms. Tiles were missing from the roof. I remember the chill the house had, even in summer, and the way the wind swooped down the chimneys at night. The orchard, outside the kitchen doors, was overgrown, and beyond it, past the unruly beech hedge with its branch-obstructed arch, the tide pool was choked with reeds. Twice in every twenty-four hours water would flow into the pool, but the sluice gate was long shattered and so, where once the water would have been held to turn the wheel, it only trickled out again as soon as the tide began to ebb. The mill had half-fallen into the mud. The wheel was rotten. It would have been used to grind wheat, when it was built—and now it turns again and powers our generator, which gives us light in winter for as long as we have the bulbs, and runs the fridge in summer. Now the orchard is carefully pruned. We do the apples in winter and the plums at midsummer, as Grandy taught us, carefully cleaning and sharpening the pruning saw, keeping the secateurs on string round our necks because they are so easy to lose. Now the hedge is clipped. In the vegetable garden, things grow in rows. There is a greenhouse with all its glass intact. This is what we do, now. We dig and we weed. We plant. We store seed, and we watch the weather carefully for signs of frost. Now there are hens in the hen coop, although in winter they live mainly in the scullery. We have fields too, which we have claimed because there is no one else to want them. But when I was a child the orchard and the gardens were overgrown. The coop was empty. The house was dusty and unloved.

I

The high house isn’t high, really, but only higher than the land around it, so that when it was first built, before the river had been banked and the cuts made to drain the land, when the rain was heavy and the tide was up and the water spread where it wanted, the house would have been an island, almost, with only the westerly part of its land unflooded, a causeway above the waterline joining the house to the heath. And now at times it is almost an island again.

II

In those first years, before Pauly was born, after Francesca came to live with me and father, we used to come here for our summer holiday, the three of us spreading out through the rooms of the high house, all into our different places. We were very separate. Francesca worked, up in one of the top rooms, one we use now to store apples, spread in lines across the floorboards, and potatoes in sacks. I roamed the garden, building dens in the honeysuckle that crept across the ruins of the walled garden, decorating my hair with goose grass, making fairy umbrellas out of coltsfoot leaves. Father stayed in the kitchen. He sat in the old armchair by the French doors, reading, or he stood at the kitchen counter, chopping vegetables to make lunch. When I was tired of being by myself, I came in from the garden and trailed after him, nagging to be taken somewhere.

—Where, though, Caro?

—The pool, please.

I loved the tide pool, then. Even now, when we are so reliant on it, I regret the loss of its wildness, the way it was before Francesca restored the mill, when reeds grew down close around its edges and small creatures rustled in and out of them, going about their secret business. I loved how still it was, the way the water rose and fell, creeping rippleless up the banks, the way its surface shone when sunlight caught it—but father was afraid of me falling in, or getting caught in the mud, so I wasn’t allowed to go near it by myself.

—Oh, all right,

he said, and went to find his jacket and his boots. I waited for him in the orchard, joggling from one foot to the other, until at last he came out to me and we walked through the hedge, down the path that slopes through a sort of meadow, to where the pool is. There he sat and watched as I swished through the grasses, taking off my shoes to feel the mud suck around my feet, searching for treasures—stones or feathers or once, miraculously, a nest of eggs, each one cracked open where its chick had hatched but otherwise intact, pale blue, speckled, near weightless in the palm of my hand. He watched me until the shadows lengthened to cover the pool entirely, until I started to shiver and yawn, and then he said,

—Home time, Caro. Chop-chop.

—I don’t want to put my shoes back on.

—Leave them off, then.

I gave him my shoes to carry, and held his hand, and together we walked back to the high house, where Francesca, alone in her upstairs room, kept working.

III

On other afternoons, father and I went to the beach to dig holes or to throw stones into the sea, the hand-sized flints that stretched like strange eggs along the tideline. Sometimes he let me bury his feet in the sand or, if it was hot enough, took me into the sea to swim, holding me under the armpits while I splashed. When I thought I felt something touch my foot I screamed, and he laughed, and I clung to him, my arms round his neck and my legs round his waist. I wasn’t afraid of the water then—or if I was it was a pleasant kind of fear, the sort that sends you yelping with laughter back up the beach when a big wave comes, before you turn and run to chase it out. It was often hot, in July and August when I was a child, although not in the way that it became later, when summers lasted half the year and every day was a white sun in a pale sky. There were lots of holiday rentals in the village, and by late morning the section of the beach closest to it would be laid out with people, row after row of them on their backs, or sitting with their children round them, buckets and spades scattered about, and the remnants of picnics, bottles of sun cream, sun hats, spare clothes. Francesca, back in the house, would say,

—How can they stand to enjoy it, this weather?

She didn’t have the habit that the rest of us were learning of having our minds in two places at once, of seeing two futures—that ordinary one of summer holidays and new school terms, of Christmases and birthdays and bank accounts in an endless, uneventful round, and the other one, the long and empty one we spoke about in hypotheticals, or didn’t speak about at all.

—They act as though it’s a myth to frighten them,

Francesca said,

—instead of the imminently coming end of our fucking planet,

and I knew that when she said they she meant father too, and me.

IV

This was when it was still the beginning of things, when we were still uncertain, and it was still possible to believe that nothing whatever was wrong, bar an unusual run of hot Julys and January storms. All summer I ran, half-naked, through the fine days, and when the weather broke, bringing rains so heavy that the water fell in long ropes through the air, I sat inside the high house and watched it from the window, marveling at the quantity of it and the force, how it scoured what it touched, washing crisp packets out of hedges, flattening shrubs, cleaning dust—and then, next morning, it would be hot again, but the air would be filled with steam; and the sea, where the river ran into it, stained with mud.

V

We went to the high house at Christmas too, when some years snow lay on the beach and ice washed in gray sheets down the river, and other years the grass still grew and the leaves had barely turned on their branches. We ate mushroom risotto and then poached pears, and sat by the fire that father had lit, and we opened our presents. No matter what we did, the house seemed to stay empty, with all the doors and windows shut against the cold and so many of the rooms dark, and I tried to make my voice fill up the house while father and Francesca sat on the sofa and read, but there was only one of me and I couldn’t make enough noise alone. When the time came to go back to our home in the city it was a relief, because there our lives had formed around us. At home, I knew how to be lonely without it showing. I knew how to occupy myself in my own way, in my own world, which was separate from father or from Francesca—which was private. At home, I knew how to be complete. And then, after a few years, Francesca rented out the high house. A young artist lived there for a while. Francesca didn’t like her work, which she thought too comfortable,

—As though,

she said,

—there was nothing important to be thought about.

When the artist left, a group of students from a nearby agricultural college moved in, and Francesca let them pay a nominal rent in exchange for renovating the garden.

VI

All that was before Pauly was born, when there were still only three of us. Francesca was not my mother. She loved me but there was no structure to it. I loved her but I was unsure of her. We rarely touched. Father loved us both, but serially—first one, and then the other. He couldn’t love us both at once because we needed such different things from him. As a three, we were not unhappy, exactly, but we weren’t happy, either—and although sometimes it seems to me, looking back, that my childhood ended when Pauly came, I can’t say that I regret it. It was too quiet then, and I was too often alone. It is hard to be a child in isolation. You take on adulthood like a stain.

VII

I was fourteen the day Francesca brought Pauly home from the hospital. Father and I spent the morning cleaning the house, polishing and sweeping and dusting, until every room smelled of beeswax and vinegar. There was a bunch of sunflowers on the table in the hall, stood up in a water jug.

—She’ll say we shouldn’t have bought cut flowers,

I said, but father replied that just this once she’d like them anyway, which I thought, privately, seemed unlikely. Francesca had been gone a week. The birth had been difficult, Father told me, when he came back from the hospital in the middle of the night for a change of clothes. The baby had been positioned awkwardly and for a long time its shoulders had been stuck trying to get free of Francesca’s pelvis, and also there had been a loop of umbilical cord round its neck which all the struggle had pulled tighter and tighter so that when at last the baby had been got free, tugged out by a pair of forceps clamped round its skull, it had been blue-gray and limp, and the doctors had taken it straight off, before Francesca and father had even heard it cry,

Reviews for The High House

[capewood · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

2022 book #17. 2021. As the world's climate reaches a tipping point a renowned environmentalist prepares a haven for her family. A very personal story of surviving disaster. A good example of what's being called "cli-fi".

[sa_magnuson · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I love a good post-apocalypse book, it’s why I signed up to read this as an ARC.But its not about found family surviving. It's about found family sadly, passively and wistfully wasting away due to lack of competence.It has a nice prose style. The author is clearly a fine writer. But it's not really post-apocalyptic fiction and it's not deep or thinky, like it seems to want to be. It's very surfacy and everyone's interactions are extremely limited. The people as shown have zero internal lives and in their surfacy lives, they're mostly selfish and so, so limited in viewpoint it's like they've all been lobotomized. It's like reading a script. And if this is how the author views people, I'm sad about that.It’s not a bad book, exactly. It's not badly written. It reads nicely.But if you like competent characters acting in competent ways who still have bad things happen to them from forces beyond their control...This is not that. It’s incompetent, entitled characters having bad things happen to them and they feel sorry for themselves about it. It made me actively angry.I’m sure other people, who like sad, elegiac musings on things lost will eat it up with a spoon. But I spent the entire thing wanting to smack the shit out of every character and boggling at the complete and utter stupidity of a post-apocalyptic CLIMATE CHANGE novel that is set at the seaside. Because that’s where I’d go in a world where water levels are meant to rise 3% overall and all coastal areas are in jeopardy for flooding and salt seepage into the water table. Yeah, that makes total sense.My family is from the middle of a national forest, one of the most remote areas in the United States. I have lived without power for days and weeks at a time after huge storms knock trees down on power lines. I have helped grow and harvest and preserve food in land unsuitable for farming where everyone still had massive lush gardens full of surplus despite constant threats from deer, raccoons and the like. I have gathered wild foodstuffs. I have fished for the table. Other family members have hunted. I have had to travel miles to a spring to get drinking water. I have cut wood to heat the house. I have had to heat bathing water on a wood stove. I knew better how to care for myself than anyone in this novel when I was 10. It is offensively stupid to be this ill-prepared for disaster to anyone who has ever lived in a remote area.And the preparations listed in this novel by the supposed climate change scientist with loads of cash do include things like seasonal clothes for a certain amount of time into the future – but not enough. Toys for her child as he grew. A small boat for fishing. A means of generating limited tidal electricity but no solar panels or small wind power – because there’s never a breeze or sunshine at the SEASHORE or anything. I mean solar panels are cheap and plentiful as are small wind turbines. FFS. You need that and an inverter and batteries. One wood stove for an entire house and it doesn’t have a boiler feature to make hot water. The dumbass list goes on and on. Where’s the library of How To books? Where are the extra seeds in case of crop failure? There are chickens, but no goats or sheep. I can see how a cow might be too hard on limited resources, but goats for milk and cheese and meat and sheep for wool and meat only make sense especially as it is stated there is pasture available. I mean, it’s ENGLAND, there are more sheep than people in some areas. Get some damned sheep at least.Instead, they’re eating up all the chickens and huddling around the single stove in constant cold. And no one seems to hunt or fish for anything, either, though they do get shellfish from the beach.But again, what are they doing by the seaside in the first place? This book offends me on pure lack of common sense even though the author makes a stab at explaining why the (remote) area was chosen.And everyone’s passive acceptance of their fate and musings about do they deserve to survive and which one will be the last one as they slowly starve from their own bad planning and incompetence just makes me want to smack them all. They don’t deserve to survive with those attitudes. They can’t die soon enough.But again, many will enjoy this book because of its elegiac tone and wistful, passive contemplation of impending climate doom in a place they should have gotten away from to permanent (remote) high ground. But honestly, if this were to actually happen nearly anyone would be better prepared and able to survive.

[beamis12 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A climate scientist and her husband prepare a place for their young son and older daughter in the event of a climate disaster. High house is where four people will come as our climate spirals out of control and into a full fledged climate armegeddon. Although this is being called a post apocalyptic novel, I believe it a prescient warning of events that will actually happen and that in many ways is happening now.A scary novel but a beautiful one as well, as it showcases a mother's absolute love for her child. It also shows how four disparite characters learn to live with each other as things are changing quickly around them. It is non linear, which is not my favorite format, but here it works because it is necessary to compare the before with the now. I kept thinking as I read this about how I would feel knowing I may be one of the last people on earth, or at least unable to learn if others exist. A heartfelt but scary look at the future we may not have.

[lauralkeet · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Caro’s stepmother, Francesca, is an environmental expert and activist who can envision the dramatic impact of climate change and the likely timing of these effects. Armed with this insight, Francesca and Caro’s father spend weekends at their rural retreat, “the high house,” making preparations to ensure safety and security for Caro and her half-brother Pauly. And then the inevitable happens. Caro and Pauly move permanently to the high house, sharing it with Sally and her grandfather, Grandy, the two remaining inhabitants of the village. At several points in this book the author describes with chilling accuracy the public’s reaction to weather events in far-flung locations, and the certainty that these things could never happen to them … until they do. I, too, have had these thoughts. I want to believe individuals and governments can still influence the course of events, and that both my generation and the next will continue living comfortable lives. The High House was sufficiently realistic to leave me feeling unsettled.Despite its ominous backdrop, this novel is also an uplifting story of family and community. Caro, Pauly, Sally, and Grandy need to adapt and learn how to live differently, and in doing so they also come to love and care for one another. The High House is a very thought-provoking book completely worthy of is nomination for the 2021 Costa Prize for Best Novel.

[sanddune_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The high house stands above a small East Anglian village, protected from the sea by the marshes, dunes and a shingle bank. As the climate crisis deepens, four people make their home within its walls. Sally and her grandfather 'Grandy' had for many years been the only permanent inhabitants of the village as it had become abandoned to second homes and rental cottages. Caro and her young half-brother Pauly find their way to the house following a desperate final phone call from their father. For the high house has been prepared as a refuge for her child by Pauly's mother Francesca, a prominent environmentalist who despite not believing that there was any hope to save the planet, continues to try.While the collapse of the world around the house forms the background to the book, at its heart is the love felt by one human being for another: Francesca's love for her son, despite her almost constant absences during his childhood; Caro's love for Pauly to whom she has been almost a surrogate mother; Sally's and Grandy's love for each other; and Sally's love for the child Pauly, representing the child that she will never have.This book deals perfectly with how it is possible to logically know the facts about the climate crisis and yet act on a day to day basis as if those facts didn't exist. These two passages in particular rang very true with me: She didn’t have the habit that the rest of us were learning of having our minds in two places at once, of seeing two futures – that ordinary one of summer holidays and new school terms, of Christmases and birthdays and bank accounts in an endless, uneventful round, and the other one, the long and empty one we spoke about in hypotheticals, or didn’t speak about at all.It is so hard to remember, now, what it felt like to live in that space between two futures, fitting our whole lives into the gap between fear and certainty – but I think that perhaps it was most like those dreams in which one struggles to wake but can’t, so that over and over again one slips back against the mattress, lets the duvet fall and shuts one’s eyes. There is a kind of organic mercy, grown deep inside us, which makes it so much easier to care about small, close things, else how could we live? As I grew up, crisis slid from distant threat to imminent probability and we tuned it out like static, we adjusted to each emergent normality and we did what we had always done – the commutes and holidays, the Friday big shops, day trips to the countryside, afternoons in the park. We did these things not out of ignorance, nor through thoughtlessness, but only because there seemed nothing else to do – and we did them as well because they were a kind of fine-grained incantation, made in flesh and time. The unexalted, tedious familiarity of our daily lives would keep us safe, we thought, and even Francesca, who saw it all so clearly – even she who would not let herself be gulled by hope – stood by the open fridge at five o’clock in the afternoon and swore because there was nothing to give the baby for his tea.This is a beautifully written book that fully deserves its place on the Costa Best Novel shortlist. If I have reservations, it is in some of the practicalities of the growing crisis that do not quite seem to make sense to me at times. But strongly recommended, nevertheless.

[nancyadair-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It is so hard to remember, now, what it felt like to live in that space between two futures, fitting our whole lives into the gap between fear and certainty…from The High House by Jessie GreengrassEvery week there is news about how the world is changing. The polar ice melting, flooding, wildfires, extreme weather. We have been warned for so many years about the future of the earth, and we still think it is in the future. But it is here.When I imagine the lives our children and grandchildren will have, I am overwhelmed. Every time I turn the heat up a notch, open a delivered meal to discover Styrofoam and plastic containers, every time I run the washing machine or turn on the oven or take a warm shower, I am aware that these things I have done all my life are luxuries enjoyed by a few, over a short period of time, and have contributed to our impending crisis.In The High House, Jessie Greengrass imagines how a few people adapt and survive the floods that overcome their village, isolated in a house on a hill.Francesca loved her child so much, she traveled the world to warn about climate change, hoping it is not too late to stave off disaster. The boy, Pauly, is left in the care of his half-sister Caro, and he becomes more attached to her than his parents. Francesca and the children’s father renovate and outfit The High House as an escape when disaster strikes. She asks neighbors to be caretakers of the house on a hill, caring for the orchard and fields, gardens and hens. Gramps remembers the old world, and with his granddaughter Sally, are waiting at the house when Caro and Pauly are warned to flee London.The four make up a new family, Gramps teaching the children skills for survival. Francesca had provided a hoard of essentials–clothes and medical supplies and even toys for Pauly– and a generator to last 100 years. It is a hard life, working every day to provide food and shelter. When the sea rises, the house becomes an island, and they are cut off from the world.The whole complicated system of modernity that had held us up, away from the earth, was crumbling, and we were becoming again what we had used to be: cold, and frightened of the weather, and frightened of the dark.from The High House by Jesse GreengrassCaro and Sally vie to mother Pauly. Each needs him. Their maternal instincts keep him safe and healthy. He doesn’t remember the old world or his parents. He is content, adaptable.The High House is an ark without two of everything. Gramps ages and passes. Some day, the girls will age and Pauly will be alone. Francesca has saved her child, but the story will end with him.I enjoyed this novel’s beautiful writing, a story almost gentile, full of love, although about a horrendous and chilling future. It is a story about the love for a child, the maternal drive to save a child. If only we saw all children as our own, perhaps we would find the strength to change our lives and alter what seems to be an inevitable future.I received an ARC from the publisher through a Goodreads giveaway. My review is fair and unbiased.

[mrstreme · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The High House has a quietness to it that I will never forget. Yes, despite this quietness, it illuminates many loud themes, mostly notably climate disaster and family survival. It's the story of Caro and Pauly, sister and brother, and their mostly absent parents--absent because they are around the world warning the planet about the impending disasters caused by our selfish choices. The mother, Francesca, can see "there's no going back" and fortifies their summer home for Caro and Pauly, and enlists the help of nearby villagers, Grandy and Sally, to keep this home viable after the impending climate disaster. These four must learn to live together among death, floods, dying wildlife, severe heat, severe cold, and the always-present fear of hunger. Two familial units must come together as one, and their melding isn't neat like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. This story, and the way it was presented on the page, reminded me of The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Stark and precisely told, The High House will not only remind you of the importance of climate change, it will remind you of how our individual actions affect everyone. Both are excellent reminders for this day and age.Thank you to Simon & Schuster for the ARC of this book. I am glad to have read it, and I look forward to reading Jessie Greengrass's other book.