Wivenhoe - Samuel Fisher

Never thought he would miss the mud: the gleaming, slickness of it. The slap and suck at the turning of the tide; its rich, bird-shit stink after a hot day and a couple of pints at the Rose. Or the green-blue-yellow hues that marked the changes in the light, as the days and seasons marched over the village and the river. And now, just snow. Endless snow.

A young man is found brutally murdered in the middle of the snowed-in village of Wivenhoe. Over his body stands another man, axe in hand. The gathered villagers must deal with the consequences of an act that no-one tried to stop.

Wivenhoe is a haunting novel set in an alternate present, in a world that is slowly waking up to the fact that it is living through an environmental disaster. Taking place over twenty-four hours and told through the voices of a mother and her adult son, we see how one small community reacts to social breakdown and isolation.

Samuel Fisher imagines a world, not unlike our own, struck down and on the edge of survival. Tense, poignant, and set against a dramatic landscape, Wivenhoe asks the question: if society as we know it is lost, what would we strive to save? At what point will we admit complicity in our own destruction?