380 pages, Paperback

Expected publication October 1, 2025

At its heart this is a story about refugees, the indignity of how refugees are treated, the inequality in how wealth enables some to circumvent those indignities, and the desperate recourses people without that advantage are driven to.

The climate crisis is more backdrop to the unfolding narrative. The exact mechanism by which the entire United Kingdom has come under threat of inundation by the titular ‘water that may come’  with the UK facing a climate crisis is left vague. We hear mention of an Icelandic super-volcano tormented into dangerous instability by glacial meltwater. We can infer that its inevitable but imprecisely predictable eruption will send a country destroying Tsunami sweeping towards both sides of the Atlantic. The why is not the core thrust of Lilwall’s narrative, it’s about what do people do now.

In some ways The Water that May Come echoes the film Don’t Look Up – where an imminent comet strike serves as an allegory for the more drawn-out disasters of the climate crisis. However, Lilwall’s focus is not so much about the science and politics of avoiding/ameliorating/evading this catastrophe. Indeed, there seems to be a refreshing acceptance of the danger and the scientific consensus, with very few naysayers and conspiracy theorizing denialists salting the pages. Which all allows Lilwall to zoom in very closely on the stories of individual people who may have a chance of survival and how they access it. This needle-sharp focus on one aspect of the climate crisis – that of climate refugees – allows Lilwall to examine a crisis that affects even ‘people like us’ and how the advantages of privilege and wealth are exacerbated by crisis rather than ameliorated. As the saying goes, we may all be facing the same storm, but some of us are doing in so yachts, others in rubber dinghies and some fighting for a pair of waterwings.

In one particular line, Lilwall captures a contemporary Gaza-ish zeitgeist,

Brits feel isolated, like they have been forgotten about; the world is watching and waiting for its next drama fix.

Funnily enough, as I write this review the news stories feature tales both of an erupting Icelandic volcano and the first climate refugee visa applications being applied for by 1/3 of the population of the most climate change venerable country in the world, the pacific island nation of Tuvalu, which adds to the topicality of Lilwall’s near future set story.

But, the first duty of any story is to entertain and Lilwall does so brilliantly with a varied constellation of characters in orbit around a compelling central quartet of Jane, Ashleigh, Gavin and Pinko.

Jane is the struggling thirty-something single mother still carrying on with her job looking after a stable of horses on behalf of the creatures’ owners and dealing with the stresses of sharing a house with her still-living-at-home daughter Ashleigh who she had very young.

In a dying economy, Ashleigh alternates between casual waitressing work and helping her mother out with the stables making the two feel like of kind of genteel middle class fallen on hard times pairing.

Pinko Stephens is the enigmatically affluent bachelor to whom money really is no object. So much so that he doesn’t bat an eyelid at arranging helicopter evacuations to Finland for his friends and family – so bypassing the serious unpleasantness facing refugees trying to flee to France. As with the nature of the ‘climate event’ facing the UK, Lilwall is a little coy with the readers in filling in Pinko’s background. It appears to be an aristocratic one of inherited wealth with his father’s shadow (and portrait) looming large in Pinko’s reflections. However, Pinko also has some measure of fame, success and celebrity in his own right – people ask him for his autograph, he delivers Ted talks. Unlike other real-world characters born into wealth and achieving an independent celebrity (Mentioning no presidents or technological plagiarists) Pinko is actually a nice person and his own personal story arc is a constant battle to ‘do the right thing’ when the right thing is almost impossible to determine.

Lilwall perfectly captures his endearing awkwardness in this line

‘You’re such a fidget,’ she says.

‘Am I?’

‘It’s constant.’

‘I’m a bit…’ He leans forward and searches for the end of his sentence. ‘Nervous.’

The fourth of the quartet is Gavin, drawn from working class Margate, a young lad with a prodigious artistic talent that he himself doesn’t fully appreciate, and a tendency to petty crime to ameliorate the poverty that his family experiences. One act of attempted theft proves to be the event that ties all four protagonists together.

There is a fifth more ephemeral character – the enigmatic Padre – who adds a touch of magical realism to the story in the prescient way he steers the character’s journeys and predicts their destinies.

Lilwall’s prose is full of elegant lines and evocative images.

Jane wakes to her phone vibrating. Daylight portions up the carpet into blocky shards and the TV has switched itself off.

Pinko, trying to remember one of his father’s mistresses who took a motherly interest in him

Later, while he cleans his teeth, his brain tries to patch together fragments of memory into a person. But he can’t quite manage it. As toothpaste foam disappears down into the plughole, he realizes that the woman from his childhood memories is lost.

Gavin stunned to discover the value of his art

Only renting mind. Still, when Pinko told him how much they were going to pay, he nearly fell off his own legs. But they don’t want to keep them? he asked. They’re gonna pay me that just to give them back to me?

The story covers a period beginning in early 2032 when the impending disaster is well understood and widely accepted. Great Britain is slowing down, businesses are closing, a televised Last Football Match is to be played in a kind of end of the world party atmosphere. Everyone who can do so, is making their plans to evacuate. The story moves on into 2033 as plans develop, decisions are made and – in a nice twisty FAFO kind of way – consequences put in an appearance.

However, Lilwall splits her narrative into two distinct timelines, opening the story in early 2033 with Jane on a desperate mission to find Ashleigh who is pregnant and has gone on the run. This alternates with past scenes that chart the characters’ course up to that opening moment of crisis before the story tracks forward to its intricately tangled denouement. The split timelines cleverly heighten the narrative tension and the impact of the ‘got-to-put-the-book- down-and-think-about-this-for-a-moment’ plot reveals – of which there are at least three big ones and quite a few smaller ones!

Part of the power of the story, for me at least, is the very recognizable settings of Kent, London and parts of Scotland. The idea of Sittingbourne, Tunbridge Wells and Margate gradually becoming ghost towns – shops shuttered and houses mothballed – is part of the plot’s magnetism, delivering the climate crisis not in some far-off country (like poor Tuvalu) but dumping it in our laps in Kent – the garden of England.

The underlying driver of the plot is the unique legal tangles and tests that face refugees fleeing to the most obvious place of safety – in France. In the first place only families or hetero-sexual couples are to be accepted – emphasising a kind of prurience that harks back to historic notions of sexuality and marriage in judging human ‘worthiness’. In theory this criteria gives a simpler way of ‘judging’ refugees than the complicated, lengthy, and dignity destroying asylum seeker adjudication process that faces contemporary refugees from war, persecution or exploitation.

However, an application based on marital status brings different indignities. I watched a programme many years back about the testing the marital status of would-be immigrants to the UK. Spouses were separated and subjected to a life determining set of test questions about things like ‘and how many rooms does your house have?’ One applicant failed because she counted the central courtyard space as a room while her husband had not.

In Lilwall’s imagined future the indignity is far worse than a Mr&Mrs quiz and, while widely understood by the characters, is rarely voiced out loud or explicitly. To put it bluntly, the refugee couples are required to perform sexual congress while watched (through a one-way mirror) by a ‘jury.’ (One might wonder on what criteria the jury score the ‘performance’ – conviction? authenticity? familiarity?). This requirement forms the keystone of Lilwall’s plot as desperate singletons stranded in the UK try to ‘couple-up’ or – if in the orbit of the fabulously wealthy Pinko – find a way onto his Finnish air tour helicopters.

In a conversation with a side character Jane probes the essentially inhumanity of this (indeed may be of any) asylum process

‘How humane is it,’ Jane says, ‘to make people go through such lengths for asylum.’

‘In my opinion,’ says Gillian, ‘they are testing us. For passivity. For obedience.’

If I had a gripe with the story, it would be the scientist in me puzzling over the exact mechanism of the disaster. It is one that makes the United Kingdom wholly unsafe – including low lying Kent, but leaves the topographically similar and near co-located France a safe refuge. I  puzzled at the logic that drives some characters to a presumed ‘safe from Tsunami spot’ within the UK that is as far from the sea as possible (they settle on Nuneaton – average elevation 60 to 100 m), rather than heading somewhere as high up as possible  (eg Buxton – highest Market town in the UK at 300 m). To be fair to Lilwall the text does mention further flight to the high regions of France’s Central Massif, and as I said the story is not so much about the cause of the crisis but how people respond to it.

The mechanism of a climate change induced Tsunami is also utilised in Rym Kechacha’s Dark River although her twin timelines are separated by around 10,000 years. The earlier one captures the impact of the real Tsunami unleashed by the collapsing Scandinavian icesheet at the end of the last ice age, a wave that permanently drowned the low-lying hunter-gatherer habitat of Doggerland and formed what we now call the North Sea. Like Lilwall, Kechacha draws on the protective instincts of motherhood as her two protagonists face different journeys in a bid to find a safe place for their children.

Another comparator would be Megan Hunter’s poetically lyrical The End We Start From – with the unnamed protagonist – a new mother charting her and her child’s way through the dangers and indignities of refugee status seeking safety in a flooded country. As with Lilwall, Hunter is more focused on the human story of responding to these extremes than the science or politics that brought her protagonist to this predicament.

A final resonance for me is with Antti Toumainen’s The Healer – set in Finland in Helsinki where many climate refugees are gathering even as the waters rise. As with Lilwall, a feature is how a disintegrating society nurdles on going through the motions of ordinary lives (Newspapers obsessed with celebrities, police forces doing a desultory investigation of crime) even as the whole system slowly subsiding beneath the water and the ultra-rich are buying their gated retreats ever further Northward.

I heard recently of a panel of publishing experts who were uniformly dismissive of the genre title Cli-Fi (a term Dan Bloom claims to have coined back in 2013 or so), preferring instead ‘climate fiction’. While I feel somewhat protective of the term Cli-Fi that has been used so widely in media and academic articles, but I sort of get the point. If ‘feminist fiction’ were termed ‘fem-fic’ it might appear to trivialize and pigeon hole an important theme that literature as a whole can and should explore. In the same way, the climate crisis is a wide ranging well documented catastrophe that we should all be paying attention to. As Amitav Ghosh said in The Great Derangement it is the duty of literature to examine this vital theme which transcends notions of genre. However, as Timothy Morton set out, the climate crisis is a hyper object ‘massively distributed in time and space, exceeding the limits of human perception and cognition’. No one novel can interrogate the crisis in its entirety (although Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future makes a valiant effort).

In joining this milieu of climate fiction, Lilwall offers us a sharply focused interrogation of the disparities of wealth and privilege in times of crisis as well as the dehumanising indignities thrust upon those seeking asylum. She throws these themes into sharper relief through the familiarity of the setting and the relatability of her troubled quartet of protagonists. The beautifully crafted prose delivers some serious narrative gut-punches around the fates of her compelling characters – a story, dare one say, that seems ripe for a cinematic adaptation, as the reader is left reflecting on what they have just read and hoping to read more.