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Doggerland

£9.9£99Clearance
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First pic - the dogs impatiently waiting in their cage to be allowed to explore their temporary home. Nikoleris et all expressed a hopeful conclusion that “Through identification with the protagonists in literary fiction, climate change moves from being distant and abstract to close and personal…and [can] create space for personal reflections.

They are supposed to be there to maintain the old and increasingly unreliable generators on an offshore wind farm, and their only contact with the outside world is through the corrupt trader who occasionally visits in a supply ship. He had knotted and unknotted a strap on the bag he was holding – he must have been leaving to go out to the farm that day.On our site, you can find not only book reviews but author interviews, cover reveals, excerpts from books, acquisition announcements, guest posts by your favourite authors, and so much more. It has an intriguing and original setting: a vast decaying wind farm in the middle of the polluted North Sea. The narrative takes on a captivating momentum when Jem discovers, tethered to a distant turbine, his father’s old maintenance boat, which he was priming for escape. Doggerland is a superbly gripping debut novel about loneliness and hope, nature and survival – set on an off-shore windfarm in the not-so-distant future. 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.

The Mesolithic hunter-gatherers lived in a rich, but constantly changing world – to which they successfully adapted. Their maintenance work involves an endless stream of small tasks, but they’re hampered by insufficient supplies and outmoded technology like satnav and tablets. A strange, haunting and poetic tale perhaps set thousands of years in the future where most of the planet seems to be covered by sea. There is much we can deduce but Smith is content to allow his readers to draw their own conclusions. Smith injects his characters with so much heart you’d have to be made of stone not to fall for them.Greil knows the facts about the father’s disappearance but has become apathetic, spending days trawling the shallow seabed for plastic debris and ancient artefacts of submerged Doggerland, the Neolithic land bridge which connected the east of England to the European continent thousands of years ago. We know that the boy is on the rig because his father abandoned his post, reneging on his contract and dooming his son to take his place. Like Itaranta – with her emphasis on the persistence of plastic in the “plastic grave” tip site where the protagonists scavenge for useful items – Smith draws attention to the pervasive fields of plastic in Doggerland’s future, not just shoals of plastic bags, but the windfarm elements themselves.

He presents these in context with a range of informative viewpoints on prediluvian cultures including Atlantis, Mu, and Lemuria. Scientists believe Doggerland flooded between 6000-8000 years ago when rising temperatures caused a mass-melting of ice and glaciers. The struggle to keep the turbines working with limited resources becomes an image of the losing battle against the rising oceans, at once awesome and terrible in their vastness. Ben Smith lives in Cornwall and is a lecturer in creative writing at Plymouth University, specializing in environmental literature and focusing particularly on oceans, climate change and the ‘Anthropocene’.Female bodies appear solely as grotesque fertility figurines in the old man’s collection of relics – “headless torsos with jutting breasts and smooth fat thighs that stirred strange thoughts [the boy] didn’t know he possessed. More importantly, it is also a well written and captivating story – for without that, Cli-Fi is nothing. 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. 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. They carry out their never-ending work, scoured by wind and salt, as the waves roll, dragging strange shoals of flotsam through the turbine fields.

We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. I can't remember who to blame for The Infinite and the Divine, but I know I was talking to someone about it - speak up if you think it was you! in a vision of future nutrition that is far less favourable (and flavoursome) than George Monbiot conceived in Regenesis (2022). Ben Smith has created a vision of the future in which the world ends with neither a bang nor a whimper but just rusts gradually into the sea. He was part of a panel discussion on the role that poetry might play in environmental activism, and read several recent poems inspired by the Earth System Model, which provides the data for the International Panel on Climate Change.

The distance from the present day is indicated in slyly throwaway comments like “The boy didn’t know what potatoes were. The novel takes its name from the ancient piece of land that once connected Great Britain to the rest of Europe. Phillips shows how, when Fairland sank beneath the waves around 3100 BC, its last survivors traveled by boat to settle in the British Isles, where they established the megalithic culture that built Stonehenge. Ben Smith’s Doggerland was a Guardian Book of the Year on its publication in 2019, earning praise from seemingly everyone who read it. It is clear that author Ben Smith set out to create a circular narrative – with the idea that, despite change, things will always revert to the way they were in time – and he has been successful in this aim.

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