A lot. A lot of characters, a lot of politicking and a lot of devastation, filling a lot of pages. But a lot of it is entertaining, and its length is purposeful ... Markley remains fixated on how people stubbornly cling to power and the pain that power inflicts on poor people with limited options ... In writing a clear-eyed, climate-justice-minded page-turner, Markley makes his influences obvious ... It’s not hard to see the role each character plays here. But Markley imagines predicaments that are hard to see coming and delivers them in convincing, fine-grained detail ... Markley conceives the climate crisis as a hearts-and-minds problem — we’ll do nothing until we viscerally feel the consequences of our actions ... The whole thing largely works. Markley is so gifted at imagining catastrophe that The Deluge generates the same kind of guilt you might feel watching a disaster movie ... He’s tried to write a big, unifying novel that has something for everyone — fans of horror, thrillers, science fiction, literary fiction and more. So it’s only natural that he’d play to both sides of the political aisle. He’d make room for hobbits and wizards if he realistically could. This novel might try to do the impossible; but as with the climate, so with novels: Why not try?

Bracing, beguiling, uneven ... The dystopia is realistic and nuanced, grim but playful, setting Markley’s book apart from the tsunami of recent climate-change literature ... The Deluge is long on ambition. It’s also long, weighing in at nearly 900 pages — baggy, restless, immersive. Centrifugal forces threaten to tear it apart, but Markley soldiers on, in hyper-real mode ... The caricature wears thin and the jokes don’t always land ... This poses a problem in the second half, where Markley’s humor and flair flatten beneath the seriousness of his purpose. He targets the inertia of our political institutions while lampooning online culture ... As The Deluge drags on, it loses its impact. It may endure as a climate-fiction classic, but it’s less than the sum of its parts, undermined by its length and labyrinthine design. The string of apocalyptic events seems cartoonish rather than cautionary.

Markley moves methodically from 2013 to the 2040s, presenting a kaleidoscopic sampling of American citizenry, an unrelenting series of increasingly tragic events and an in-depth examination of the desperate corner into which the world has painted itself. It is, if nothing else, an astonishing feat of procedural imagination, narrative construction and scientific acumen ... The redeeming merits of The Deluge call to mind those elaborate trick shot videos on social media in which the primary objective is missed but something else exciting occurs ... A giant canvas with Brueghelian detail that, while making the story compelling, also flattens some of the emotional impact. Characters disappear for as many as a hundred pages and reemerge a year later, necessitating repeated exposition dumps. As a result, the reader doesn’t feel intimately close to most of the characters ... When climate change is the subject of fiction, it becomes easy to interpret as advocacy, as a political novel of ideas rather than a tale driven by characters. Markley does little to dispel this impression ... This borrowed cloak of newsiness reduces the complexity of fiction into a single-minded polemic. Each storm, each wildfire, each avoidable death becomes a rehash of the same warning: This is what will happen if we don’t act now. Repeated finger-wagging, even the most deftly and eloquently crafted, grates after almost 900 pages ... More dispiriting than galvanizing.

A story of incremental chaos, political lethargy and scientific minutiae, and it is utterly mesmerising. There have been many more flamboyant end-of-the-world scenarios in fiction, but few as frighteningly plausible ... Constructed as a collage of texts: first- and third-person narratives intermingled with magazine articles, scientific papers, White House briefings and podcast transcripts. His ability to inject these ostensibly dry sources with pathos, verisimilitude and agility of voice sets the novel apart from other apocalyptic melodramas. Point-of-view characters span the sociopolitical spectrum and the wealth ladder ... For all its dispassionate techno-detail, The Deluge is a book with a big, pulsing heart.

Ambitious, sprawling, chock full of characters ... Readers would do well to keep the book’s multiple viewpoints sorted from the beginning and should know that, with unrelenting doom throughout its 800-plus pages, this is a demanding but worthwhile read.

A climate disaster novel grounded in reality and research, a cacophony of narratives that swirl and intertwine as the world as we know it comes perilously close to ending ... While the book feels large in hand, it reads quick, never settling or lingering.

Brilliant ... Markley makes this anything but didactic; his nuanced characterizations of individuals with different approaches to the existential threat make the perils they encounter feel real as they navigate cover-ups and lies. It’s a disturbing tour de force.

Hyper-realistic, alarming ... Sprawling ... A more streamlined story that felt less inclined to bolster its authority with mountains of detail would likely have been more powerful. Nevertheless, the author has produced a highly memorable invention in a character named Kate Morris, a charismatic eco-activist with a ferocious clarity of purpose. Her narrative, taken on its own, is unusually vivid and distills much of what the novel seems to care about most: warning of massive disruptions to our civilization in the decades to come and exploring possibilities for maintaining our humanity as we struggle to manage them. An ambitious rendering of a forbidding future and the public and private challenges that will define it.