John Lanchester on why he wanted to write about climate change in his first dystopian work of fiction

For most of this biography Hermann Hesse – ‘capable of writing fearful rubbish’ – comes across as he does on the page

Having children has really had an effect on my thinking about the future

THE wall is coming, according to President Trump’s recent movie-poster meme of himself captioned thus. Donald Trump’s wall has, of course, been long threatened. But in the unlikely event that the prize-winning novelist and literary journalist John Lanchester were given to posting such ridiculous memes of himself, he could at least deliver.

For The Wall is here in the eponymous, scary shape of Lanchester’s fifth novel, which is related by Kavanaugh, a young guard patrolling the 10,000-kilometres long, five metres high concrete barrier that has been built around the coast of Britain in some unspecified nightmarish future following a global climate disaster, known as “the Change”. The Wall has been built to keep out the flood of desperate refugees, “the Others”. It is guarded by “the Defenders,” like Kavanaugh, who serve two years on the Wall, working 12-hour shifts. “It’s cold on the Wall,” is the book’s opening sentence. It is also, movingly, its closing sentence.

Lanchester’s last novel, the brilliantly Dickensian-cum-Trollopean satire Capital (2012), is set against the backdrop of the 2008 banking crisis and was adapted for TV. This book is his first dystopian work of fiction. It is also the first of a shelfful of bleak novels offering grim images of the future being published this year, culminating in September with Margaret Atwood’s much-anticipated sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. The Wall can also be read as an addition to the burgeoning volume of Brexit literature, such as Amanda Craig’s fine The Lie of the Land and Jonathan Coe’s Middle England.

Rather than Brexit, though, was

Vintage, £8.99

The up-and-coming Cork author sets his first novel in a future Ireland battered by ceaseless rain and surrounded by a polluted sea, where organised crime flourishes. The kid in yellow is a lad from a poverty-stricken estate who became a runner for gang leader the Earlie King and impregnated his daughter, who died in childbirth. The only reason the Earlie King hasn’t wiped him from the face of the Earth is a promise made to his departed daughter that he would leave him alone. But the kid in yellow has made a promise too, and is determined to snatch his child from the King’s clutches and run away with her, through a post-apocalyptic Ireland in search of a better life. Blurring the borders between dystopian science fiction and myth, Denton proves himself a dab hand at conjuring up a convincing future world and sustaining a suspenseful mood in this inventive debut.

In the 1940s there was nowhere hipper than Paris, where Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, Cocteau and their fellow thinkers held court in cafes and bars on the

is unfair. Though a niece was married to the man who pioneered mobile asphyxiation units for the Nazis (she later committed suicide), Hesse was drawn to the communists and had no time for Hitler or Hitlerian nationalism, or the kind of “patriotic” writing that was supposed to support it. The former charge, that their son was “morally insane”, is harder to deny the devout Hesse family.

There was a repeated history of absconding, of attempted or para-suicide, of a lack of either faith or willed direction in life.

Hesse’s private life was a shambles. He seems to have rejected the passionate and intelligent courtship of Helene Voigt – whose 1898 photographic portrait seems both incredibly modern and flagrantly sexy – and then married the utterly unsuitable Maria Bernoulli, who later and perhaps as a result of her treatment spent long periods in psychiatric institutions.

In Ruth Wenger, he found another muse/wife/helpmeet/dogsbody, but she had perhaps too much personal pride and self-esteem, if not quite the