Some climate novels try to persuade you with facts. Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible (German title: Kinder der Flut) does something sharper: it asks what happens when a generation has lost trust—in institutions, in parents, in the promise that adults will protect the world they inherited. The setup is deceptively simple. A group of families rents a lakeside…

Katharina Bendixen’s Taras Augen is, on the surface, a near-future coming-of-age story shaped by a catastrophic industrial accident: an explosion in a chemical plant releases a toxic cloud, a region is evacuated, and two teenagers—Tara and Alún—are separated in the aftermath. But the novel’s real engine is not only catastrophe; it’s visibility: surveillance, erasure, witnessing, and the fragile,…