Doggerland is the vast, fertile area that once connected the east coast of England to mainland Europe – until, in around 5000BC, it disappeared beneath a rising sea. How do we know of its existence? Was it really there, or did someone just dream it up? The strange and interesting thing is that, in a sense, it is a new place as well as an old one. Only at the beginning of the 20th century did people start to be aware of it, when new deep sea trawling nets began to drag up not only the bones of mammoths, but also those of animals from the Holocene period, which started 11,500 years ago; and not until the 1990s did it finally receive its name, when the archaeologist Professor Bryony Cole decided to call it Doggerland. The Boy’s father once worked on the farm but disappeared in puzzling circumstances. Consequently, the son was sent by the Company to fulfil his contract, but where he went remains a mystery and the Old Man is loath to discuss the matter.

This book has been on my to read list for a while, and is a rather impressive debut, if not the most cheerful of books to be reading over Christmas. The boy has been sent by the Company to take his place, but the question of where he went and why is one for which the Old Man will give no answer. I must be honest: I was not sure about these. Some readers may appreciate their concision, and the change of pace they represent, but they seemed to me to be at once both plodding and a bit fey. I could have done without them. The comparison with The Road comes from the setting which is the not-too-far-distant future when the sea has become a dead place and where our two protagonists live a lonely existence with only occasional visits from a supply ship. It is bleak, it is depressing:Doggerland was an area of land, now submerged beneath the southern North Sea, that connected Great Britain to continental Europe. It was flooded by rising sea levels around 6,500–6,200 BC. Geological surveys have suggested that it stretched from Britain's east coast to the Netherlands and the western coasts of Germany and the peninsula of Jutland.

For The Boy it is a search for his father – previously The Old Man’s partner, and whose place he is required to take It is not long before she begins to suspect that the island’s history may provide some clues and lead her to the man responsible. But the deeper she dives into its history, the more clear it becomes that even tiny islands can hide some dark secrets. Wild Shores” by Maria Adolfsson is a brilliant follow-up to “Fatal Isles” the Sunday Times Book of the Month. It is all about a suspicious death, a disused quarry, and the bubbling to the surface of a dark past. The plot development is deliberately very limited – The Boy finding a little more about his Father and having to decide whether he follows his desire to escape to the open seas.

Edited by Luc Amkreutz & Sasja van der Vaart-Verschoof | 2022

The cast – two grizzled and taciturn maintenance men, one older (“the old man”) and one not so old (“the boy”, though he’s not actually a boy). 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. I found it both terrifying and hugely enjoyable, as well as tremendously moving. Ben Smith's writing is incredibly precise; working with a restricted palette of steel greys and flaking blues, he paints the boundaried seascape with vivid detail. This is a story about men and fathers, the faint consolation of routine, and the undying hope of finding out what lies beyond the horizon. I absolutely loved it' - Jon McGregor

Mesolithic people populated Doggerland. Archaeologists and anthropologists say the Doggerlanders were hunter-gatherers who migrated with the seasons, fishing, hunting, and gathering food such as hazelnuts and berries. The characterisations – the two taciturn figures in this story are ciphers, we never learn much about them. Their emotional and psychological state is mostly left up to the reader’s inference. As the Old Man dredges the sea for lost things, the Boy sifts for the truth of his missing father. Until one day, from the limitless water, a plan for escape emerges… Doggerland is a haunting and beautifully compelling story of loneliness and hope, nature and survival.The prose – unadorned, almost flat, often technical. Quite a lot about turbines and nacelles, gunwales and gantries. More poetic interstices describe the glacial melt that flooded Doggerland over the course of millennia, cutting Britain off from continental Europe. A boy who is no longer really a boy. An old man who isn’t as sharp as he once was. A lonely rig in an endless sea of gradually failing wind turbines, towering above a sunken land.