James Bradley is a brilliant writer of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. His recent book Deep Water (2024) is an elegiac essay in response to the wonders of the planet’s oceans. It celebrates undersea mysteries and the marvels of the surface, denounces the slavery and oppression connected with trade routes, and extols the sensuality of swimming and surfing.

Deep Water increased Bradley’s international reputation, but it was also an important milestone in a writing life dedicated to awakening readers to the harmony of the natural world and the need to act urgently to prevent human-induced climate catastrophe.

Landfall, Bradley’s seventh novel, continues his engagement with the environment. Coming on the heels of Clade (2015) and Ghost Species (2020) – both novels set in a precarious future – it again takes up the subject of a warming world.

Review: Landfall – James Bradley (Penguin)

Landfall is a haunting and propulsive crime novel set in 2050s Sydney. Through its compelling narrative, Bradley weighs the value of a human life on an ecologically ravaged planet.

The novel’s future world is one of extreme weather events and soaring daily temperatures. Parts of the metropolis are permanently underwater due to the Big Melt, a glacier event 20 years earlier that has caused sea level rise across the globe. The air is suffocatingly humid. Everyone carries water and is constantly thirsty. Waves lap at asphalt roads, parks are crowded with tents and people queue daily to fill water containers from plastic tanks. Children are sullen or silent; barking dogs harass. The homeless flock to food vans near Central Station.

In certain parts of the city, the urban environment is nothing more than “roofless buildings choked with garbage, dead trees, the rusting shells of abandoned cars and trucks”. Apartment blocks and houses need repair. Sandbags shore up bridges and makeshift........

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