Land Sickness is a book about climate change. It’s both a novel – the autobiographical story follows the narrator as he leaves a Paris burning under unnaturally high temperatures and travels to the island of Porquerolles in the south of France – and a philosophical essay. Climate change moves with Schultz: he describes the Paris apartments that are poorly adapted to high temperatures, scalding under grey slate rooves; as he’s packing his bag, he writes about his awareness of the quantities of water needed to make his jeans, his t-shirts; when he arrives in Porquerolles, he bears witness to an island being socially eroded by the rapacious business of tourism as well as environmentally eroded, as the island’s coastline dissolves away, its waters are polluted by ship oil and litter, and fresh water habitually runs out.

But the book is not a litany of disasters: it’s a diary of sorts, a reminder of how climate change is omnipresent in our daily lives. This book is a response and an antidote to Amitav Ghosh’s assertion that the lack of writing about climate change in Western literature is an “imaginative and cultural failure”. It mixes prosaic realisations (“The Anthropocene is not a nice place to sleep”) with literary sociology, introducing the reader to ecological theory and the human cost of climate change over the course of a slim 100 pages.

Catherine Bennett