We learn that Britain’s totalitarian government rules with an iron fist and limitations are in force to limit the freedom of movement, and harsh punishments are in place awaiting those who flout the new laws. I won’t go into what happens when Ellen meets her mentor other than to say it creates more questions in her mind than it provides answers. So this book immediately fired my imagination and created a series of pictures in my mind. The thing I most like about this sort of fiction is that it offers up opportunities for the story to go in innumerable directions. She’s reluctant to accede to this request – her relationship with her mentor having ended badly – but she’s put under pressure to pay a visit to the hospital in London where he’s seeing out his final days. But one day she receives a visit from two government officials advising her that her university lecturer and mentor is dying and has expressed a wish to talk to her. We learn that she’s divorced, has no children and is pretty much fully immersed in studying water flows and currents. Scientist Ellen Hopper works on an oil rig in the North Atlantic, off the south coast of England. Britain won the end of the world lottery and has become the pre-eminent force in the world, and the place everyone wants to get to. there is a narrow habitable region which has, by luck alone, avoided either extreme. Roughly half of the planet is in perpetual frozen darkness and most of the rest is turning to desert, thanks to the unremitting full force of the sun. The year is 2059 and the earth stopped turning thirty years ago. Yet when two government officials arrive, demanding she return to London to see her dying college mentor, she accepts-and begins to unravel a secret that threatens not only the nation's fragile balance, but the future of the whole human race.Īt first the world started rotating more slowly, then it’s rotation stopped altogether. She wants nothing more to do with her country after its slide into casual violence and brutal authoritarianism. The United States has colonized the southern half of Great Britain-lucky enough to find itself in the narrow habitable region left between frozen darkness and scorching sunlight-where both nations have managed to survive the ensuing chaos by isolating themselves from the rest of the world.Įllen Hopper is a scientist living on a frostbitten rig in the cold Atlantic. Now, one half of the globe is permanently sunlit, the other half trapped in an endless night. Forty years ago, a solar catastrophe began to slow the planet's rotation to a stop. A visionary and powerful debut thriller set in a terrifyingly plausible dystopian near-future-with clear parallels to today's headlines-in which the future of humanity lies in the hands of one woman, a scientist who has stumbled upon a secret that the government will go to any lengths to keep hiddenĪ world half in darkness.
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