Diane Cook’s debut novel, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is set in a not-too-far-off future that resembles the distant past. The world has been transformed by climate change and urbanisation; the novel’s landscape is one in which its characters spend their days hunting and gathering, making clothes from animal skins and sinews, setting up camp and taking it down again, and searching for clean water.

Bea and her husband, Glen, have exchanged the ‘City’, where they were raising Bea’s young daughter, Agnes, for the Wilderness State, somewhere in the west of North America. The three of them are part of an experiment: the Administration has allowed twenty volunteers, known as the Community, into the continent’s