Earlier this summer, I travelled through Europe on a book tour. Everywhere I went, the heat broke records. In Italy, Germany and Spain, I sought refuge from the afternoon sun in air-conditioned hotels. In normally temperate Zurich, it averaged 37 degrees. I jumped into the Limmat for relief. On my final day in Warsaw, Poland had never been hotter – one of 14 countries to hit a historic high. In June, when I left to return to the US, Europe was scorching. At the end of July, as I write this, it is burning.

Since the heatwaves began, there have been more than 10,000 excess deaths. Yet for many, myself included, the high temperatures brought nothing more than inconvenience – uncomfortable commutes, heat rash, less time outdoors. This seems to be a defining feature of today’s climate crisis; deadly for some, banal for others. Even when the world is on fire, it somehow doesn’t feel like an emergency for everyone.

This disparity cast my mind back to Hurricane Sandy in 2012. I was living in New York, one of millions ordered to shelter in place. (I was lucky – hundreds of thousands were ordered to evacuate their homes.) I followed instructions. I stayed in my warm, dry apartment on the Upper West Side, watching trees swaying violently against the dark sky. The next morning, the rain had stopped; the sun was out, the air was still again and the power was still on. When I went outside to survey the damage, there was little to see except a few broken branches. The mood in my neighbourhood was jovial. The subways were closed, schools were shut, work was called off. Brunch was on.

In other parts of the city, it was a different story. Whole fleets of taxi cabs submerged in water, their canary yellow roofs peeking out; a huge midtown crane snapped cleanly in half; the collapsed wall of an apartment building. I watched and rewatched a video of a power plant exploding. Half a million people, including most of the residents of lower Manhattan, were now without electricity. The American news outlets focused almost exclusively on New York. The international news sites told a more complete story: Sandy killed 233 people in eight countries and caused $70bn in damage.

Several days after the storm, I volunteered in Chinatown, distributing basic goods – batteries, canned food and bottled water – to elderly people who lived on the highest floors of public housing buildings and hadn’t yet ventured outside since the storm. (the lifts weren’t working and they weren’t able to take the stairs). The apartments smelled of rotting food and unflushed toilets. The national guard rolled through the streets in tanks; rats brazenly stalked the pavements and Red Cross workers posed for photographs with locals. Research labs at NYU lost their lab animals during the storm; the news reported them dead, but rumours spread that the rodent population of the city had grown by 10,000 transgenic mice and rats.

New rules governed downtown life. Bars served free drinks by candlelight, neighbourhood people with handmade signs offered water to passersby, small shops offered free charging stations. The roads around Ground Zero stayed flooded for weeks; the water was green and brackish. Amid the darkness, one building stayed lit, its squares of gold stretched into the sky. Goldman Sachs would not be stopped.

In the days and weeks after Sandy, I was struck by many disparities: between downtown darkness and uptown light; between those who were able to escape the city to second homes and those who had nowhere else to go; between the countries with a quick, organised disaster response and those that relied entirely on community help. I also found myself thinking about the natural disasters I had heard about as a child and teenager growing up in Singapore: the 1999 Odisha cyclone, the 2003 heatwave across India, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2006 Southern Leyte mudslide in the Philippines, the 2007 cyclone in Bangladesh. These were disasters with much higher death tolls that I realised many people had never heard about.

When Sandy made landfall in 2012, I had just begun my PhD in English literature. For work, I read canonical 19th-century realist novels; for pleasure, I read contemporary literary fiction. I searched for novels about the environment but often found myself disappointed. In many, the severe consequences of the climate crisis were packaged as a future possibility – something to come, one day. But the climate crisis is not only a future certainty, it is past and present truth. The disaster is already here.

Several years after Sandy, I read Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement, in which he argues that literary fiction has failed us. Ghosh perfectly articulated my disappointment about the climate fiction, or cli-fi, I had read. But he went further. Ghosh listed the reasons the modern novel was unsuited to the challenge of representing the climate crisis. One, contemporary western novels had become “ever more radically centred on the individual psyche”. Two, unlike other genres, novels can’t range freely over space and time. Three, our literary imagination had become “radically centred on the human”. And four, the climate crisis is defined by improbable events and “probability and the modern novels are twins”.

When I first read The Great Derangement, I agreed with Ghosh that “the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination”. But I also wondered whether it would be possible to write what he said didn’t exist but should: serious literary fiction that captures both the freak event and the mundane truth of the climate crisis.

Ghosh laid down a gauntlet; I thought I’d try to pick it up. Over the next eight years, I wrote a novel that moves towards two cataclysmic events – Hurricane Sandy and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami – but also documents the slow violence that unfolds in both New York and Thailand. My debut novel, Under Water, seeks to represent climate change in the very form Ghosh suggests is ill-suited to the task: a realist novel centred on a single individual.

It is true, as Ghosh notes, that, unlike epics, novels do not usually bring multiple universes into conjunction. But a realist novel centred on a bourgeois subject in today’s globalised world can in fact move across space and time. A single individual might, as my protagonist Marissa does, grow up on a barely inhabited island in south-east Asia and then, a decade later, live as an adult in a large metropolis on the east coast of the United States.

My book also responds to Ghosh’s striking claim that the modern novel was “never forced to confront the centrality of the improbable”. In Under Water, I try to imbue Hurricane Sandy, a highly improbable event, with expectation. Because of her childhood and her past, Marissa experiences the approach of Sandy differently from other inhabitants of the city.

Under Water is a riposte to Ghosh’s claim that the contemporary realist novel is destined to fail us. A single novel cannot show everything, everywhere, all at once. But it can, more effectively than any other cultural form, wield what I think is still one of our best weapons against this or any other crisis: the determination to pay close, careful attention to the people and places we are losing, every day.