Not Alone

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Maybe it's because of his age, maybe it's because Katie didn't do a good job explaining the world to him. And Katie was an overachiever, really trying to do her best to make a difference for the environment and climate. I found Harry such a fascinating character to read, his perspective so ill informed, so uneducated and lacking in experience of the outside world.

There’s been a microplastic storm and Katie and her young son Harry have been stranded in isolation for five years in their small flat in London. Publication dates are subject to change (although this is an extremely uncommon occurrence overall). She hopes her fiance, a military veteran named Jack, can raise Harry after she, too, succumbs to the dust.Katie is pained by her choices, and the shortcomings of the world she is raising her child in, and we can feel that emotion in the novel. In the present, Katie worries about plastic dust particles, toxic rainstorms, and encountering other people who might have survived. I possibly could have tolerated all this as a perfectly mediocre three star read if it hadn’t been so long, but the fact that it just dragged on and on and on, holy fuck. But then I really had to stop and think what would I expect from a young child living through an apocalypse? Somehow this micro plastic fiasco effects women significantly more than it effects men, and the book never attempts to explain this even a little bit.

The bodies begin to build up around them and layers of poisonous dust hang heavily in the air, seeping into the soil and slowly killing anything attempting to cling onto the natural world.

Katie forages, hunts the surviving animal population, and provides for Harry, who was born after the storm, and who has never left their little home. Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here. His writing has appeared in Chicago Review of Books, The Rumpus, The Offing, Electric Literature, Vol 1. There are new threats to their safety here, fellow survivors who are determined to start a new population, to save the world they so desperately misunderstood. The day of the storm, Jack had been working at a medical clinic in London, and was separated from Katie.