Drought. Flood. Storms. Every year S.J. Litherland wonders if she will survive the winter to see the spring. The planet is under siege. The weather can no longer be trusted. The damage has already been done. Her Marginal Future is buffeted by childhood trauma, the collapse of the Durham coalfield and USSR, and a cold Brexit wind, ‘Everything that mattered gone in the morning.’
COVID comes as a reckoning of ills illuminating the past and not yet written future. In her long isolation she finds memories are interlopers in the narrative. Old age is full of wealth, a cinema with a stock of films. The book interweaves the approaching apocalypse with the lifetime already lived, the garden in its seasons, a warning and a bequest.