Sea level went, and Britain has ringed the entire island in concrete. Every citizen serves two years as a Defender on the wall, twelve-hour shifts staring at cold water, and the rule is simple: If Others get past you, you go over the side and into the sea in their place. Kavanagh starts his tour bored and freezing and hating the older generation who caused all this and won’t say so. Lanchester writes the cold better than almost anything, and the middle third turns into something much harder than the setup suggests. This one got under my skin. I kept picturing a mashup of the Wall at the northern border of the Seven Kingdoms in Game of Thrones and Pink Floyd’s wall.
The Wall