Thanks for my proof NetGalley.
This book had me hooked right from the start. I was desperate for this team to find their way.
Unfortunately, I was disappointed with the conclusion of the book...the excitement stayed high until the end when it just finished. I felt let down with the way the story played out.

Australian author James Bradley has long been interested in exploring the impacts of climate change through fiction with books like Clade and Ghost Species. His latest book Landfall is pure climate fiction crossed with a police procedural. While in Landfall he depicts a possible future Australia, Bradley is also interested in the impacts of a changing climate on other countries and the resulting movement of people to find safety.
Landfall opens by the Tideline, an area of Sydney where rising sealevels have made some low lying coastal areas uninhabitable or the refuge for the poor and dispossessed who live on upper stories of flooded buildings. Detective Sadiya Azad and her partner Paul Findlay are dispatched to the area to investigate the disappearance of a five-year-old girl. At the same time, Tasim, a refugee living on the streets of Sydney sees a young girl being put in the back of a van and despite having nothing, is determined to try and rescue her. Adding pressure to the whole situation, there is an impending tropical cyclone which is predicted to hammer an already fragile city.
Like any good crime novel, the investigative procedure is a framework which Bradley uses to explore his milieu. Azad and Findlay can range around the city although they start to step on some toes when they discover the potential involvement of a high powered employee of a company that builds detention centres and new weather-proof developments. But through this he also hangs the backstories of Azad, her father Arman, now suffering from dementia and reliving his younger years in his mind, and Tasim who all came to Australia as climate refugees, forced from their countries by killer heatwaves and destructive flooding.
Bradley provides plenty to chew on thematically in Landfall. From a frighteningly real future Sydney, to the way Australia treats refugees, to the usual rounds of development and corruption at the expense of the poor, to dealing with a loved one with dementia to coercive control. Bradley bakes these issues, where he can, into the narrative but that does make the whole venture a little shaggy. Arman’s story, for example, while interesting, has not real connection to the overall plot other than the fact that he lives with Sayida and this makes her life more complicated.
If Landfall falls down anywhere it is that it is not a particularly surprising crime story. The investigators, seem to spend a lot of their time going round in circles to learn things they could have learnt earlier. And the payoff, while possibly satisfying for the reader and tending to cathartic as it takes place at the height of the promised mega-storm, does not realty make any sense. But this is really a book where you come for the mystery and stay for the depiction of what feels like a terrifyingly accurate portrait of a potential global future.

In Landfall James Bradley takes us to a dystopian near-future Sydney that is battling major weather event while also offering a reluctant haven to climate refugees. This is both a cracking read and a deeply human and intelligent crime novel.

One week into 2025 and I'm already on my second Australian climate fiction novel. Trend alert!
Set in near future Australia, the core of this novel is a police procedural mystery. Detective Azad is searching for a little girl, reported missing amongst the poorest and most marginalised area of the city.
This is interspersed with POV scenes from Arman, Azad's father, and Tasim a refugee who becomes involved in the case. Arman's scenes were moving, and Tasim's flashbacks to his home country and journey to Australia were harrowing and horrifying. Bradley, as always, creates imagery of climate catastrophe so well. These were probably my favourite part of the novel. However, they were also not really relevant to the main story. There didn't really seem to be any reason why the novel needed to be set in the future. We have extreme climate events and climate refugees already, which could have been used to frame the story. I think if I had expected this going into the book, I wouldn't have found it so frustrating. So I still recommend this book - just know that you are getting two different things from it.