Set in the future where the world is overrun with pollution and the seas are full of rubbish, Doggerland is a dystopian drama that follows the lives of a boy and a man who work by themselves at an offshore wind farm.

It's a thought-provoking read and a relevant speculative mediation on what we need to save before it is too late. Third pic - my sister's dog Hudson looks mournfully on the empty breakfast plate that wasn't for him. The Mesolithic hunter-gatherers lived in a rich, but constantly changing world - to which they successfully adapted. Following a ten-year hiatus, Luna has chosen to secretly record her comeback album where she was born and raised.In the middle of the North Sea, between the UK and Denmark, lies the beautiful and rugged island nation of Doggerland. Ben Smith is based in North Cornwall, where he lives with his partner, the author Lucy Wood (4th Estate) and is a creative writing lecturer at Plymouth University. Throughout the novel they face an endless battle as they try to repair the machines before they all fail. The setting is everything here, and it really feels like Smith has considered how every part of the environment would interact with every other part of it, as well as the effect it has on the characters.

We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. But the plot revolves around their relationship and the job they do day-in day-out for no apparent purpose as they battle with hostile weather, personal secrets and the loneliness of this odd cold watery world. Yet embedded deep within Doggerland we also sense a cry of protest against our violated landscape and a celebration of the mysteries of its ancient formation. There are allusions to exactly how the world has ended up the way it has, but little in the way of real concrete conclusions. The cast – two grizzled and taciturn maintenance men, one older (“the old man”) and one not so old (“the boy”, though he’s not actually a boy).The Road meets Waiting for Godot: powerful, unforgettable, unique’ Melissa Harrison, author of At Hawthorn Time. However, Admussen in Six Proposals for the reform of Literature in the Era of Climate Change (2016) admonished that authors should “ retire the portrait of the single soul.

The machinery is failing – the farm’s percentage performance slipping inexorably downwards, losing several percentage points in the course of the story. The Road meets Waiting for Godot : powerful, unforgettable, unique’ Melissa Harrison, author of At Hawthorn Time.So, when she wakes up in a hotel room next to her boss, Jounas Smeed, she knows she's made a big mistake. These claustrophobic, contained lives are reminiscent of Beckett or perhaps Pinter … The prose is simple, at least on the surface, but the cadence of the sentences, their honed style, is perfectly matched to its barren, sinister setting.

I don't normally review books but I felt I could do it some justice in just a few words without giving anything away. The Old Man makes home brew and trawls the relatively shallow seabed for vestiges of the lost neolithic settlements of Doggerland, submerged in a rush at the end of the last ice age. What is unclear is how far the Old Man might be a trustworthy accomplice, or an obstacle to be overcome.

There’s mention of flood defences and enough other references to make it clear that this is a world approaching an apocalypse, if it’s not already effectively had one. The location is vague and claustrophobic, the pace is usually slow, and there are repetitive scenes and few conversations. It turned out that the coffee machine could be made to dispense water too, which the boy only found out after his hands shook so much that he pushed the wrong button.