"Salt Lick" by Lulu Allison

An audio book.

Jessie (son of Lena and Marshall) live in a rural village - post-pandemic. The village is vulnerable to rising sea waters, and people are leaving. Lena's the teacher, but there are too few pupils for the local school to be viable. Emergency services take hours to reach them. Marshall wants to move to London for work reasons. The kids explore the abandoned houses. Jessie finds a stray dog and cares for it. Marshall needs the admiration of peers and is impressed that Jessie doesn't seem to need it. Nationalists move into the next village - Little Denton.

Isolde, living in trendy London goes to a prison to visit the terrorist who blew up her mother and wounded her. She'd grown up in a children's home, tried once to kill herself. She fell in love at 28, gradually softening her tough skin. They wanted kids. After years of trying, he left her. The prisoner tells Isolde that he knows her. He says they used to live in a farmhouse. Isolde, with friend Arthur's help, works out where the farmhouse might be. Her mother might have been in the same movement as the terrorist. She heads out to the farmhouse with camping equipment, meets a 17 y.o. gay Lee, who tells her that the villages make up their own laws now. There are "white towns". Chelmsford has been abandoned. Cambridge University keeps going.

Back in the first timeline, Marshall and Lena agree to move to London. The nationalists have moved from the nearly village after one of their children killed one of Jessie's friends. Private cars have become prohibitively expensive. Jessie takes time to adapt to city life. Later he goes to university. Lena dies in a pandemic. Marshall and Jessie are isolated from each other by their grief. Jessie gives up university.

After 30 years of imprisonment, Jessie dies. He was innocent - the State wanted his group to be considered terrorists. Isolde finds the farm. Her sister Ester is there. Outside London, villages have their own laws and vigilantes. Most food is imported. Cambridge University still exists. Lee is hunted down by people from his village. They attack and are fought off. We learn that Jessie is the prisoner Isolde talked to! Isolde returns to London then back to the farm - to stay? She finds a lover ("they will be able to find a way to each other") and wants to get to know her sister better.

Some paragraphs are prefaced by "Chorus". Sometimes it seems that cows are the chorus - a sort of hive mind. The language (and not just of the chorus) is often elevated -

• "the uncertain knife-edge of this new threshold"
• "dusk domes the sky"
• "birds sing, a million tiny facets shaping the air"
• "held in the harbour of his arms"
• "leans back into the embrace of the past"
• "they rove the countryside, play themselves true in lost woodland hours and field drifts, roving absences where time and purpose blend into some other medium"
• "she feels emotion clamour at her throat"
• "empty houses defy the wood with decayed determination"

Other reviews

• lonesomereader (The story shows a gradual acknowledgement that whether we like it or not our society has been substantially altered because of viruses and climate change. Therefore, a collective desire for a return to a simpler recent past is a wish that probably won't ever be fulfilled. )