Revealing the vast archaeological evidence in support of the existence of Doggerland, as well as its threads of influence in early cultures around the world, Phillips also shows how the fate of this sophisticated ancient culture is a warning from history: the cataclysmic events that happened to the first civilizations could happen again as the world heats up. The machinery is failing – the farm’s percentage performance slipping inexorably downwards, losing several percentage points in the course of the story. It took me a little while before I started to enjoy Doggerland – was the most exciting moment really going to be when the boy found a shoe in his fishing net? The characterisations – the two taciturn figures in this story are ciphers, we never learn much about them.

Registered office address: Unit 34 Vulcan House Business Centre, Vulcan Road, Leicester, Leicestershire, LE5 3EF.Told from the boy’s perspective, we follow his journey as he tries to discover the secrets of the farm and if there is any way to escape it. The monotony of the routine is only broken by occasional visits of the Supply Boat and its talkative “Pilot”, who is the only link with what remains of the ‘mainland’.

Blink and you’ll miss it, but the two main characters do actually have names: the old man is Greil, and the boy is Jem. Part of the pleasure in reading this novel comes from trying to piece together an understanding of what exactly is happening on the mainland, considering that the perspective given to us is that of two people stranded in the middle of nowhere.Doggerland is brilliantly inventive, beautifully-crafted and superbly gripping debut novel about loneliness and hope, nature and survival—set on an off-shore windfarm in the not-so-distant future. Jem and Greil’s attachment to the ruined wind farm is reluctant, but time seems to have blurred their vocations into an attitude of unquestioning survivalism; an unseen authority incarcerates them offshore, and like weary Robinson Crusoes stuck on a prison moon, they might as well get on with it. Much like The Wall, John Lanchester’s latest, this is a timely offshore story that investigates the ramifications of England’s isolationism. The chart that the Boy glimpses aboard the Pilot’s boat shows a land that is losing its battle with rising sea levels “There were flood defences, drainage fields and reinforced beaches now well below the waterline.