If the world as we know it were to end tomorrow, would you be able to take care of yourself? (I think the lockdown gave us all a glimpse of helplessness, but still) Can you light a fire? Do you know which mushrooms are poisonous? How to catch fish without a spinner? Wait, forget about all that, can you point north right now?

In America, there are people who can do all that, called preppers, because they prepare for the end of the world. On dedicated forums they exchange tips, share lists of necessities; in the wild they practice short survival stays. It’s a trend that’s growing in popularity. Jenny Offill writes about climate anxiety brewing in America, affecting everyone, amongst them Lizzie – a middle-aged librarian, with toned down ambitions and amplified worries about family and her drug addicted brother. The novel is written in first person, with scattered pieces of dialogue and information extracts, and Lizzie sounds humble, funny and worried.

She earns extra income working for an environmental guru, who used to be passionate about the future, but all she wants now is solitude. Lizzie answers the letters she gets from all over the country, a good amount of them from ‘hippies.. all about composting toilets and water conservation and electric cars and how to live lightly on the earth while thinking ahead for seven generations.”

The topic of global warming and imminent environmental devastation has been drawing attention for so long with so little actually done that it just became dull. In her Guardian interview, Jenny Offill says ‘I became interested in why I wasn’t more interested”. Isn’t it how most of us feel? Desensitised yet depressed?

I haven’t read a better depiction of climate anxiety, the feeling that we all share and learned to lived with. Weather, a topic that used to serve as a conversation starter, became quite sinister and tricky to talk about.