Giles Foden is justly celebrated for a series of novels set in Africa that mix well-researched historical settings with invented details and highly charged plots. The sequence began in 1998 with The Last King of Scotland, a dazzling, violently comic re-creation of Uganda under Idi Amin, and continued with Ladysmith (set during the Boer War), Zanzibar (about the terrorist bombing of the US embassy in Tanzania) and Freight Dogs (involving the Congo wars of the 1990s). His characters are often scientists: a volcanologist, a meteorologist and, in Thirst – a historical thriller with a science fiction dimension – a pair of physicists.

It is 2014 and the planet’s water is running out. Catherine Brosnan has travelled from Ireland to Dekmantel, Namibia, with the aim of locating an aquifer in the vast reaches of the dunes that will provide nothing less than a source of life for indigenous people. At first, she is forced to kick her heels, finding her work blocked by the American and Chinese corporations that have divided Namibia’s mineral resources, siphoning off the precious water. 

The novel portrays the corporate plunder of African resources and wealth, the vicious exploitation of Namibian mineworkers and the contradiction between the West’s sanctimonious pledge to switch to clean energy and the filthy realities of the extraction of lithium, which is needed to facilitate the switch. Foden articulates with