This was a powerful reading experience that I lost myself in completely. I sank into the consciousness of the main character, Lina Stephenson, and felt as if I'd fallen into a disturbing dream that was edging towards a nightmare but from which I couldn't wake. I emerged with a sense of having lived through something difficult but important, dark but ultimately hopeful and also of having read something beautifully written, and elegantly structured.

'This Is Our Undoing', has elements that could classify it as a dystopian thriller, a story of personal trauma, climate fiction, or even magical realism but none of those labels work well for me. They are the threads, not the tapestry.

This is a tense but low-key story, soaked in guilt, fear, and impotent rage, heightened by bonds of love, inconvenient but inescapable empathy and an inability completely to let go of hope.

Set against a broadly drawn but credible dystopian background, it delivers an intensely personal story that is tightly focused on the personal cost of making difficult choices in circumstances where there are no good options, where you are confronted by the monstrous and where your survival may require you to become a monster.

The book opens quietly with scientist Lina Stephenson carrying out environmental fieldwork in the beautiful Rita mountains in Bulgaria. Her work feels real. routine and satisfying. It quickly gave me the sense that the mountains and the work that she did there were her refuge from the rest of the world. It allowed me to see Lina as resilient, cool-headed and competent, not quite at peace but finding moments of contentment. Then, like a slowly lengthening shadow, external politics, unexplained but threatening, fell across her refuge, dimming hope and summoning the ghosts of her past. I loved the way the pace of the story was managed so that what starts as a sense of disquiet, of distant threat, becomes a storm of intense fear and despair.

All of this is achieved in simple, clear prose that led me by the hand into the story. Take a look at the opening paragraphs and you'll see what I mean:

Some days, Lina Stephenson forgot about her ghosts entirely. She almost believed that the miles between her and her family were choice rather than necessity. Today was one of those days, and the last. There was a storm spinning in across Western Europe, extinguishing wildfires. There were bomb attacks and migrants drowning, but here in the Rila mountains there was only Lina cycling old roads to Beli Iskar, its red-tiled houses dotted between trees and incandescent in the sun. A cat crossed the track and it was still a surprise to see them, after flu and the culls. Two women in their garden shifting logs were watching her. Here it begins.
Wilson, Lorraine, This Is OurUndoing (p.6). Luna Press Publishing. Kindle Edition.

In a few lines, we get a picture of a new normal that includes regular natural disasters, terrorism and migrants fleeing from their homes. We also know that Lina is haunted by her past, even in this mountain refuge.

So, what is going on? Well, 'This Is Our Undoing' is set in a near future, ravaged by climate change, where nations have devolved into totalitarian City States and the most powerful international body is the ESF (Environment Security Force) that owns and protects the wilderness spaces. Lina works for and is protected by the ESF. Before she was a scientist with the ESF, Lina had a different name, a name that is on London State's Kill List. when the ESF let Lina know that London State had linked the assassination of a senior member of their government to a known associate of hers before she changed her name, she becomes desperate to arrange safe passage for her father and her step-sister to join her in Bulgaria. Then, the ESF let her know that the family of the recently assassinated man will be taking temporary refuge at Lina's research station and things become complicated.

Just as I was settling into what I thought was a dark but plausible political dystopia novel, Lorraine Wilson shifted the story into something more and different as small acts of violence occur in the woods and at the research station that may be political or may be something more sinister.

The arrival of the assassinated London State politician's broken and grieving family pulls equally at Lina's fear of and rage at what they represent and her empathy for the trauma that they've been through and the pain they are now in. Her anxiety for her family, her guilt about her past and her worry about her real identity being disclosed wear away at her day after day, raising her anxiety and clouding her judgement. None of the options she has to protect herself or her family are good ones. Most of them make her reassess the kind of person she is and the kind of person she is willing to become.

I felt the resilient, rational scientist I'd met at the start of the book starting to slide into a state of mind that embraced the supernatural and an acceptance that she was no longer sure what was real or what was right but that something bad, something worse, was coming and she would have to choose one of those bad options and take the consequences.

The denouement comes in a fierce storm, under threat of violence and when Lina is certain of little except that what she chooses to do next may save or condemn her family and may make her into the kind of monster she has always detested.

I loved that this was a book with no easy answers and no comfortable boundaries. I was caught up in how it turned the repression and violence of a totalitarian regime from something abstract into something personal, painful and complicated. ( )

This is a thriller set in the near future, full of psychological themes and based on resistance to totalitarian regimes. So, possibly unlike anything else you have read. (Excepting 1984.)

This novel is carefully written with some really beautiful sections, particularly where Lorraine Wilson describes Lina's work as a field biologist living in a carefully preserved wilderness in Bulgaria. Her enjoyment of freedom, the beauty of nature, wildlife, scenery and the weather seems idyllic. It's a stark contrast to what we hear about the various States where the wealth gap is huge, and where poverty, violence, hunger and death threaten many. We don't actually visit these places affected by climate change but find out about the problems from the knowledge and memories of Lina and other characters. As a keen fan of science fiction I would have liked to have found a little more worldbuilding, some history of how the world changed in terms of climate, economics, technology and politics from the one we are familiar with.

There is a strangely claustrophobic feel to the story because we never leave the nature reserve and everything we know about the world comes from Lina. A small group of disparate people descend upon the station as the result of a murder in London. These are very varied and interesting people and I felt I got to know them fairly well though they all seem to hide secrets and problematic pasts. In a sense the scenario is similar to the familiar country house weekend murder where a reader would expect to find untrustworthy motives, murky histories, unreliable witnesses, sudden violence, coincidences and plenty of secrets. But, believe me, it's better than that!

Some of the writing is excellent and I was so taken by an atmospheric account of a character emerging from unconsciousness that I went back and reread it. ( )