Book description
Every day I buckle on my guns and go out to patrol this dingy city.
Out on the far northern border of a failed state, Makepeace patrols
the ruins of a dying city and tries to keep its unruly inhabitants in
check. Into this cold, isolated world comes evidence that life is
flourishing elsewhere - a refugee from the vast emptiness of forest,
whose existence inspires Makepeace to take to the road to reconnect
with human society. What Makepeace finds is a world unravelling,
stockaded villages enforcing a rough and uncertain justice, mysterious
slave camps labouring to harness the little understood technologies of
a vanished civilization. But Makepeace's journey also leads to
unexpected human contact, tenderness, and the dark secrets behind this
frozen world. FAR NORTH leads the reader on a quest through an
unforgettable arctic landscape, from humanity's origins to its likely
end. Bleak, haunting, spare - and yet ultimately hopeful, the novel is
suffused with an ecstatic awareness of the world's fragility and
beauty, and its unexpected ability to recover from our worst trespasses.
Marcel Theroux is the author of three previous novels, A Blow to
the Heart, A Stranger in the Earth, and The Paperchase, winner of the
2002 Somerset Maugham Award. He lives in London.
