If the clipped, crystalline fragments in The End We Start From—the way the narrator charts baby Z’s first days amid flood sirens and displacement—spoke to you, you’ll love Offill’s shard-like meditation on marriage and early motherhood. It’s the same intimate pulse of thought and feeling, rendered in aphoristic bursts that turn ordinary moments into something stark and alive.

Like Hunter’s London-in-floods—where places blur to initials and camps, and R and the narrator move through half-known spaces with baby Z—McCarthy pares the world down to essentials. A father and son travel through ash and silence; names fall away, details are few, and survival becomes a ritual of small acts. If you valued the way the catastrophe in The End We Start From is implied rather than explained, this will grip you.

If the rising waters and ecological dread—those news bulletins threaded through the mother’s journey with Z—hooked you, Watkins’ vision of a drought-ravaged West will feel hauntingly kindred. Luz and Ray drift through a desiccated California with a rescued child, their road shaped by mirage and scarcity. The prose is lush and uncanny, echoing Hunter’s poetic severity while digging into what it means to nurture hope in a broken landscape.

If you were drawn to the mother’s meticulous, almost ritual record of feeding, washing, and moving with baby Z after the flood—and the way survival becomes a rhythm—Haushofer’s novel will resonate. A woman finds herself alone behind an invisible barrier and learns to farm, chop wood, and endure, chronicling each task with spare attentiveness. It captures the same steady, interior suspense you felt in the camps and on the island refuge.

If what stayed with you was the tight focus on the mother-baby dyad—those hushed rooms, the bodily immediacy of birth and milk while the world drowns—Mackintosh’s island novel offers a similarly close, pressurized gaze. Three sisters are raised in seclusion by ritual and rumor of a toxic outside; the result is eerie, sensorial, and intimate, echoing the private, bodily stakes that carried you through The End We Start From.