After years as hostages, locked away in the basements of a war-torn Spain and handed from one extremist faction to another, Lily, Piers, Gary and Helen emerge to a much-changed world. It's raining most of the time, sea levels are rising faster than anticipated and storms have become more extreme. Returning to London just as the Thames Barrier is about to be breached for the first time, they discover that flooding is becoming a way of life and the world is drowning faster than climate models predicted. This is a fine addition to the British science-fiction tradition of disaster novels, reading like something John Wyndham might have written if he had tackled climate change on a global scale, laced with the kind of scientific rigour you would expect from Baxter. Meticulous in its extrapolations of change, gritty and realistic in its telling and studded throughout with striking imagery, Flood is a superb study of what it might be like to survive a flip in global climate. This is one of the leading science-fiction writers of his generation on fine form.