Landfall, by James Bradley

A five-year-old girl is missing and a category five cyclone – the third in four years – is due to hit Sydney in the next week. Police detective Sadiya Azad must battle racism, misogyny and corruption as well as the literal rising tide of climate change to find the child and solve a murder that seems to be linked to her disappearance. Set 20 to 30 years in the future, following the ‘great melt’, Bradley paints an all-too-believable dystopian picture of where the current reality of fanning xenophobia, lip service on climate action and rising inequality is likely to take us. The tense crime thriller thinly cloaks a plea for more empathetic treatment of refugees and urgent action on climate change. It ends rather abruptly, with several questions left unanswered, but on a note of hope – based on human connection.