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.

Doggerland is character-driven perfection. It is bleak, claustrophobic, beautiful and strangely hopeful. Ben Smith paints such a stunningly vivid portrait of this very narrow setting that I could almost smell the metallic, industrial tang of the rig. My mind took me back to the tour of the USS Midway in San Diego, even down to the way I kept painfully grazing my ankles on the sharp-edged stairs. That same sense of a harsh, unfriendly but functional environment and a space designed for far more people and considerably more activity left hollow and rattling.

Doggerland is a thoughtful, speculative novel that forces you to consider your relationship with the land around you and the reality of the changes that we’re all guilty of inflicting on our planet. If you don’t enjoy character driven fiction, it probably won’t tick your boxes but I dare anyone to say that this book and its underlying message don’t pack one hell of a punch.

Huge thank you to 4th Estate Books for my copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.