Zenith

The long-awaited sequel to Exodus fulfils all its anticipated promise. A timely warning of global flooding, it continues Mara’s story as she tries to lead the refugees from the boat camp outside the sky city of New Mungo to the land she believes still exists at the top of the drowned world.

Fox, grandson of the creator of New Mungo, stays behind in the city he has come to loathe to try to lead a revolution against the greed and corruption which have so flawed its creator’s vision.

Both journeys are epic: both are richly allegorical. The personal discoveries Mara and Fox make are those the world around them ought to make.

Bertagna’s future world is cinematically vivid, her prose like a spotlight – revealing the cold, helpless misery of the first endlessly dark frozen days at the top of the world and the determination to remember a precious past through words, rituals, emotional connections.

Mara and Fox are oceans apart. She gives birth to their baby and he fans the first flames of response to his ideas of revealing the truth to blinkered generations of Sky City dwellers – surely, a third book beckons? One can only hope so.