Floodland by Marcus Sedgwick

Rating: 7 out of 10

Zoe was born into a world of floods. All the land on earth is slowly being eaten up by the rising sea–her parents tell her things were not always like this: people didn’t used to have to scavenge in broken buildings for food, there used to be land all around, land so far as the eye could see, where you could walk for days on end and not reach the ocean. On the little island of Norwich, which is becoming smaller and smaller every day, Zoe and her parents try to live a normal life. Zoe’s dad teaches her to row, something he tells her might come in use one day.

Their small family tries to leave the island on the last supply ship to come from the “mainland,” but in the confusion and melee, Zoe is left behind on Norwich. Time passes and things get more and more desperate for Zoe living on her own, but one miraculous day she finds a boat–more precious than gold and diamonds in her world. She manages to escape Norwich and rows towards where she believes the mainland, and her parents, might be.

However, Zoe ends up on Eel island, a little lump of land even smaller than Norwich. The “eels,” as they call themselves, are a bunch of raggedy kids led by a charismatic boy named Dooby–things are even more savage and uncilivized here, and Zoe despairs of ever finding her parents again…

Sedgwick writes speculatively about the future of the earth after global warming, and its effect on ordinary citizens in the UK. His style is very simplistic and a little eerie, especially concerning the subject manner. This also a re-read, I think I first read it when I was younger, and was going through my apocalyptic, end-of-the-world, doomsday and hellfire reading phase. It’s very short, about a hundred pages.