This month COP 27 is about to kick start in Eygpt. Executive director of the UN Environment Programme said: “Climate change is no longer a future problem. It is a new problem.” Increasingly, warnings such as Andersen’s are making their way into the books – fiction and non-fiction; countless award-winning, bestselling titles released this year have the climate crisis at their heart, from those on the Booker Prize shortlist to Pulitzer Prize winners. A selection of books that are not intended to scare or depress, but to energise and entertain; a selection of books that find hope in the intelligence of humanity and the resilience of our natural world.

The planet on Fire by Mathew Lawrence and Lurie Laybourn-Langton ****

Planet On Fire

The environment is collapsing at a rapid rate and in increasingly unpredictable ways. Everyone knows that this is happening, and yet the only politics that is emerging to tackle it are coming from the increasingly nativist far-right. How should the left respond? In Beyond Barbarism, two rising stars of the British left lay down a set of proposals for a fundamental reshaping of the global economy and offer a roadmap for tackling climate breakdown. Building on the debates surrounding the Green New Deal debates that both authors have been central to, Lawrence and Laybourn argue that it is not enough merely to spend our way out of the crisis.