Lost Girl

Adam Nevill

2016 Nominee

British Fantasy Award Best Horror Novel

22 October 2015
9781447240914
448 pages

Synopsis

Set amidst the devastation of climate change and global pandemics, Lost Girl is a dystopian nightmare from the master of horror Adam Nevill.

How far will he go to save his daughter? How far will he go to get revenge?

It's 2053 and climate change has left billions homeless and starving - easy prey for the pandemics that sweep across the globe, scything through the refugee populations. Easy prey, too, for the violent gangs and people-smugglers who thrive in the crumbling world where 'King Death' reigns supreme.

The father's world went to hell two years ago. His four-year-old daughter was snatched from his garden when he should have been watching. The moments before her disappearance play in a perpetual loop in his mind. But the police aren't interested; amidst floods, hurricanes and global chaos, who cares about one more missing child? Now it's all down to him to find her, him alone . . .

Nevill ornaments his tale of brutality and bloodshed with florid Gothic prose, like flock wallpaper gracing a torture dungeon. There's acute psychological insight amid Lost Girl's squalid inferno, and the author's vision of our near future is horribly plausible.
Adam Nevill excels at making nightmares real . . . Nevill's portrayal of the breakdown of civilisation, mirrored by the father's own spiralling moral crisis, is unflinchingly realistic - though not without hope. The author says he wanted the novel to amend "the status of climate change from the existential to the very real", and in this Lost Girl succeeds brilliantly
Bleak, disturbing and terrifying - and horribly compelling.