AFTER THE FLOOD

released OUT NOW! 432 pages | Hardback/ebook/ audiobook

Author Kassandra Montag Publisher The Borough Press

The world is ending – as we know it, anyway. Climate change will do that. A century into the future, rising sea levels have turned the Americas into an archipelago. Survivors huddle in villages on the sides of mountains, or else – like narrator Myra and her daughter Pearl – they take their chances out in the water, dodging ruthless, piratical “tribes” while struggling to hold their ships together in a world of dwindling resources.

On the literary apocalypse spectrum, Montag’s debut novel lies midway between the sunny, all-you-need-isShakespeare optimism of Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven and the bleak midwinter of discontent that is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Montag certainly doesn’t shy away from either the exhausting monotony of hard physical labour, or the risks of trusting strangers. At the same time, while violence lurks in rumour and memory, we hear about it more than we actually see it – and when we do see it, it’s more action film than horror.

There’s enough narrative tension to keep the pages turning. But Myra’s quest to find her lost elder daughter isn’t that compelling, and her shipmates are mostly twodimensional characters, so the fact that she’s manipulating the latter for the sake of the former never quite grips us, or discomforts us, as it should. Nic Clarke