New Climate Fiction Author Sarah Ruiz-Grossman’s Favorite Cli-Fi Books

This Earth Day, settle into "A Fire So Wild," Sarah Ruiz-Grossman's debut novel about the societal impacts of climate change.

This story and interview originally appeared in HuffPost’s Books newsletter. Sign up here for weekly book news, author interviews and more.

In January, the European climate agency Copernicus reported that the Earth was on track to break annual global heat records, the latest undeniable symptom in the climate crisis. One month after this report, Sarah Ruiz-Grossman released her debut novel, “A Fire So Wild,” adding to the vital voices in climate fiction, a literary genre marked by notable works such as Octavia E. Butler’s 1993 “Parable of the Sower.”

As a former HuffPost reporter, this isn’t Ruiz-Grossman’s first foray into writing about the environmental predicament and, more specifically, about how climate change affects the population unequally and leads to further social injustices.

Informed by this breadth of knowledge, “A Fire So Wild” tells the story of a wildfire overtaking Berkeley, California. We observe the Bay Area city through the perspective of characters who possess vastly different socioeconomic statuses and access to resources, yet are interconnected in some way. As the blaze transforms homes and precious wildlife into ash and the city’s residents are left with the scorched aftermath, readers truly understand that natural disasters, though indiscriminate, never hit everyone the same way.

Shortly after the book’s release, I had the opportunity to hear Ruiz-Grossman talk about her novel alongside the creator and host of “The Stacks” book podcast, Traci Thomas, at Skylight Books in Los Angeles. Appropriately nestled in front of a live tree growing at the shop’s center, we listened to Ruiz-Grossman explain the ways that works of fiction like hers can impart necessary commentary on the climate crisis in ways that nonfiction cannot.