Termush is a novel about a luxury coastal resort which is being used to house those rich enough to book a place there.

After some discussion and amends with the art director, we sent these off to Ella and awaited our fate.She stared at the doctor when he wanted to help her and continued to shake her head while she repeated that there was nothing wrong with her urine, that she would not allow her urine to be examined and that there had been nothing in the brochure about this type of examination. I cannot say that I loved ‘Termush,’ but it is worth reading because of the questions it raises and deserves its place in the dystopian cannon. At the same time, with deglobalisation and broken supply chains, the devices on which we rely may no longer be available or functional. And it’s Holm’s broader themes that make this seem curiously modern, all too familiar in an age of mass migrations and global pandemics, Holm is clearly engaged in political allegory as much as in storytelling. Here the narrator’s imagination, his expectations of apocalypse and how the end of the world would look, are not capable of preparing him for the lived reality of the experience.

Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months… it was here if anywhere that the first significant event had taken place – on this balcony where he now squatted beside a fire of telephone directories, eating the roast hind quarter of an Alsatian before setting off to his lecture at the medical school. The world looks as it did in the second when the disaster struck; we, who remained behind, can move around the immense black crystal, but we are quite incapable of altering it.In rationalist philosophies the idea of apocalypse is dismissed as a fever dream, but if it is understood to mean the end of a local world or way of life it is a common human experience.