BRIEFLY VERY BEAUTIFUL

British writer Dineen’s dystopian story about a woman struggling to keep her children safe in a world on the brink of collapse feels uncomfortably as if it’s describing not a fictional future but next week.

Cass lives in “The City,” never named and located in the south of a country also unnamed but with a British feel. It’s facing extreme versions of conditions familiar today: an increasingly hot climate, frequent fires, collapsing infrastructure, corrupt authoritarian government, extremist gangs, and fraying social norms. Choosing to work abroad, Cass’ husband, Nathaniel, a doctor, has left her behind in The City, where she attempts to protect their children from deteriorating conditions. Many of the strong mothers in recent fiction pale in comparison to Cass, with her fierce maternal commitment—not only to her own baby but also to the 4- and 8-year-olds whose mothers died during Nathaniel’s previous two marriages. She experiences typical moments of contemporary motherhood, from easing a resistant child to sleep to resenting a husband’s lack of involvement to sexual fantasizing, but Cass also deals with the breakdown of electricity and communication technology, has a room devoted to bottled water storage, worries that the kids have become used to breathing burned air, and regularly rehearses “terror runs” in her head to prepare for the potential moment when she must escape with the kids. Then a group of male climate activists—Nathaniel thinks they’re incels—attacks a playground. Cass first heads to her mother-in-law’s secluded rural home, where there’s food and breathable air, but staying with the untrustworthy Eden proves untenable. Cass’ next stop is a commune of sorts in the supposedly safe, walled-off north. But safety is never certain; Cass’ choices, never easy to make. The new world order described by Dineen’s graceful prose is sometimes unbearably depressing, yet this is not an apocalypse. Happiness remains a possibility for Cass and her kids.

Often alarming and upsetting, but worth reading for the deep heart at its center.