Six books that explore the devastating impact of flooding

Edward Platt was born in 1968 and lives in London. His first book, Leadville, won a Somerset Maugham Award and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. He is also the author of The Great Flood which explores the way floods have shaped the physical landscape of Britain, and The City of Abraham, a journey through Hebron, the only place in the West Bank where Palestinians and Israelis lived side by side.

At the Guardian, Platt tagged six of the best books about flooding. One title on the list:

It is not just natural forces that are a threat – official neglect may compound their effects, as Rebecca Solnit argues in A Paradise Built in Hell. When Hurricane Katrina flooded 80% of New Orleans in 2005, the damage caused by what she calls the “somewhat natural disaster” of the storm was compounded by the “strictly unnatural disaster of the failing levees”. After this humanmade catastrophe came the “failure or refusal of successive layers of government to supply evacuation and relief”, which led to the “appalling calamity of the way that local and then state and federal authorities decided to regard victims as criminals and turned New Orleans into a prison city.”

Read about another entry on the list.

See Alice-Azania Jarvis's reading list on flooding.

--Marshal Zeringue