As with the best novels there are memorable scenes, powerful images that could hardly be more relevant to our current environmental concerns; the Boy discovering coffee and the inevitable paper cups it comes in, and when the storm hits, being stand-out for me. In a recent article I quoted from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale about societal changes happening so slowly they are almost imperceptible, or as she put it far more vividly: “in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it. The Boy, who is no longer really a boy, and the Old Man, whose age is unguessable, are charged with its maintenance. The spareness of the writing style made for a vivid yet intangible effect, leaving the reader without much substance to hang onto. It is a book I can see many people loving and I hope many people will pick it up – because it is so very well done and so interestingly told.

Book of the Month (Doggerland Fatal Isles: Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month (Doggerland

It is a beautiful, fully realised piece of writing and one of many high points in a novel of poise, depth and surprising narrative propulsion. Photograph: Benjamin Van Der Spek/EyeEm/Getty Images/EyeEm The flooded world of Doggerland is ‘wholly persuasive’. However, this is less true than the bleakness, because there is action and plot movement through this story. Civilization, once so progressive and dynamic, is now, much like this immense, expiring windfarm, corroded and all but unsalvageable. I’ve labelled it environmental, because wildlife seems to have disappeared, and the tale of what catches onto their hooks tells its own story of the mess we are making of our planet.Smith focuses on two main characters, maintenance men on an enormous wind farm out in the North Sea, who lead a solitary existence on a decrepit rig amongst the rusting turbines.

Doggerland | Book by Graham Phillips | Official The Mystery of Doggerland | Book by Graham Phillips | Official

I most appreciated the moments of Beckettian humor in the dialogue and the poetic interludes that represent human history as a blip in the grand scheme of things. There are several threads in the storyline that were not really concluded and yet I didn’t mind that, as it portrays the ambiguity and complexity of this bleak future world. And there is much in common with this book – a smaller cast of only two but the same rhythmic quality as The Old Man and The Boy carry out their regular routines – the backdrop here being a combination of the harsh natural world of waves, wind and weather and a man-made world of turbines.

New marine archaeological evidence has revealed the remains of a large land mass to the north of Britain that hosted an advanced civilization 1,000 years before the recognized “first” civilizations of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, or India. There was nothing to draw the eye, nothing to catch hold of, just the clouds rushing past, and the currents sweeping. Consequently, the son was sent by the Company to fulfil his contract, but where he went remains a mystery and the Old Man is loath to discuss the matter.