The only other thing that breaks up the monotony of their days is the visits from the supply boat pilot. 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! The distance from the present day is indicated in slyly throwaway comments like “The boy didn’t know what potatoes were.

Or the way the boy will be repairing a turbine, only to find an example of his father’s handiwork – something akin to a haunting in this seemingly most unmagical of settings. Jem, who is presumably in his mid-teens, and “old man” Greil, who is clearly unwell and weakening, live in serfdom aboard an abandoned, dilapidated accommodation rig; they use an electric boat to maintain the decaying wind turbines that extend for up to 80 miles around them. He wrote his first book (more novella than novel) aged 13, and has dabbled in writing stories for nearly four decades since then. 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). The novel thus asks questions about responsibility and sacrifice, and comments on modern addictions and a culture of disposability.Furthermore, when the Old Man uses a system of rods and T-bar to draw core samples from the seabed, what comes up is not simply soil. Whilst the reader is made to share the ennui of the Boy and his mentor, Smith turns his story into a gripping one by making the most of the scant plot elements. Can it be that this young man really remembers so little of his past and has so little curiosity about the wider world?

in a vision of future nutrition that is far less favourable (and flavoursome) than George Monbiot conceived in Regenesis (2022).Provided they stay at their posts, neither their work, nor the failing output of the wind farm seems to attract any attention – or even communication – from the Company that not so much employs them as owns them. Although they know each other’s names, they rarely use them; who else would they be speaking to, after all? The way Ben Smith’s prose flows reminded me of the ocean – something that has to be intentional given that the North Sea is as much of a protagonist as the three other people in this novel. In the middle of the North Sea, between the UK and Denmark, lies the beautiful and rugged island nation of Doggerland. The Mesolithic hunter-gatherers lived in a rich, but constantly changing world - to which they successfully adapted.