Krissy Kneen

She's reclusive.

She doesn't really want to know what's going on in the world.

But she's very quickly forced to open herself to the world.

I love the way it's never explicit what's happening.

We do have to work it out and it becomes a bit of a parable of many things that are going on in our contemporary world.

It seems as though not only the environment is breaking down due to climate change and people are being forced to move away from the coast and

People are traveling north, but there are also migrants or refugees who seem to be coming from perhaps over the Mexican border or other southern countries into America.

And they're working their way up through, I think this is Virginia or Maryland, Chesapeake Bay is where the island is.

They're heading north and it's the politics of the south which are almost like the old slave ownership politics and this is almost like the Underground Railroad where slaves were escaping and moving north to comparative safety and there are those who want to kill them and there are those who want to imprison them and there are those who want to help them and save them.

So it's a political thing

thriller in a sense, but it's a very universal story, sort of writ large.

Well, the people become kind of survivors, don't they?

The land has been ruined by the rising seawater, which has left salt in the soil.

Trees die, plants won't grow.

It's very hard even to grow a vegetable to eat and the shops are running out of supplies.

So Kitty becomes a kind of pioneer again, doesn't she?

She tries to gather together food.

She tries to grow things.

She saves electricity by cooking over a fire and cooking.

They need heating, so she has to think about that.