"When The Floods Came" by Clare Morrall

An audio book.

The Hoffman virus 20 years before has killed most people, and left most of the others sterile. Roza (22 - her 1st person PoV), Boris, Delphine and little Lucia live with their parents Moth (mother - a teacher) and Poppy (father - an artist) in a Birmingham (UK) high-rise about 20 floors up. The original Lucia died in an accident. Poppy found an abandoned child a few months later to take her place. The government is in Brighton. Roza is due to marry Hector, who she's never met. She needs to marry before her 25th birthday. They both work for TU, a Chinese company (China has a Mars station). The family rarely see anybody and never tell people where they live. They have computers (pods - personal online devices, embedded in a wrist or arm), and internet (Freight - a slow version - and hi-speed) but not mobiles (the masts haven't been maintained). The lifts no longer work. The depend on spare parts. There are floods in winter, isolating the blocks. The UK is quarantined - other countries drop goods by drone every so often. All except the big cities have been incinerated by drones to destroy corpses and the virus. Old children's song and nursery rhymes are chanted.

Roza explores the abandoned city centre - the library and art gallery. In a room she finds 2 skeletons in a hug.

Ashy Kent starts living in their high-rise. He can't read - dyslexic? He says there's a fair soon, in Coventry. They all cycle there, amazed to see people. The venue is an old football stadium. There's ice-cream and spit roasts. They learn that popular, cunning Ashy is a smuggler - Ireland, France. Being children, they are an attraction. Thinking they see Lucia's family they suddenly leave. They spend the night in a computer centre. The caretaker hasn't seen anybody for 20 years. Not trusting him, they leave in the night, in the rain. When they go back to the centre to collect a forgotten bag, they find Dan dead. Shot. Back at home the family decide to leave soon.

Meanwhile, Hector has been cycling from Brighton, stopping at Waystations. He's late.

Poppy confesses that, years before, he killed a looter who'd been attacking Moth. Hector doesn't arrive, though they find his bike. Ashy privately tells Roza that he's been protecting her, that Dan was a threat. Roza suspects that he killed Hector too. Ashy claims innocence. He gets out a gun and threatens to sell Lucia. They get the gun off him but he fights off the whole family. Until Poppy, with some help from the family, kills Ashy. No surprise there.

A helicopter appears - from Brighton, paid for by TU. They've been monitored by satellite all the time. Intervention has been discussed. They still don't quite trust outsiders. Roza at first runs off, but then the whole family get into the helicopter.

It's slow. A film would have accelerated the descriptions and mood-building. The family have self-isolated so I'm surprised that Ashy's appearance didn't provoke more excitement and hormones. Would they really have left Lucia alone at the fair? Would the authorities really have let Hector approach such a dangerous situation?

Other reviews

• Gwyneth Jones (Clare Morrall has been called “a novelist in search of a syndrome”. But though some of her misfit protagonists – including the desolate Kitty Wellington, in Morrall’s Man Booker- shortlisted debut, Astonishing Splashes of Colour – have had conditions defined by a diagnosis (clinical depression, synasthaesia, Asperger’s, PTSD), the labels never define her characters. On the contrary, Morrall’s concern seems to be with human frailty more generally: we are all misfits. ... The measured pace of the story is mesmeric; the wilfulness of adolescence excruciatingly well drawn. The finale, admittedly, is rather a cheeky reversal of what we thought we knew, but this is a skilled writer who has rediscovered her power to hold a reader engrossed.)
• Goodreads (only 3.4)