‘The Street meets Looking forward to Godot: powerful, unforgettable, unique’ Melissa Harrison, writer of At Hawthorn Period.

Doggerland is normally a superbly gripping debut novel about loneliness and wish, nature and survival – set on an off-shore windfarm in the not-so-distant long term.

‘His father’s breathing had been loud in the tiny room. It acquired smelled smoky, or more like dust. He previously knotted and unknotted a strap in the handbag he was about Doggerland holding – he will need to have been leaving to go out to the farm that day. ‘I’ll get out,’ he’d said. ‘I’ll come back for you, ok?’ The youngster remembered that; had always appreciated it. And, for a while, he’d believed it as well.’

In the North Sea, definately not what remains from the coastline, a wind farm stretches for a large number of acres.

The Boy, who’s no longer a really boy, as well as the Aged Guy, whose age is unguessable, are charged with its maintenance. They perform their never-ending function, scoured by blowing wind and sodium, as the waves roll, dragging strange shoals of flotsam through the turbine areas. Land is a memory.

So too may be the Boy’s father, who done the turbines before him, and disappeared. The son has been sent by the business to take his place, but the issue of where he proceeded to go and why is certainly one for which the Aged Man gives no answer.

As his partner dredges the sea for dropped things, the Boy sifts for the reality of his lacking father. Until one day, from the endless water, a plan for get away emerges…

This beautifully crafted novel about loneliness and hope, nature and survival, is as haunting as it is compelling – an extremely special debut indeed.