It's evening and Robyn Lockhart, resident of Brighton, which is a coastal city in East Sussex and some 47 miles south of London, is meeting up with her boyfriend Vincent. They are getting ready for a night on the town, but a storm is threatening.
Robyn works as a waitress, she lives with her mother and her sister, Alice. In fact, Robyn often looks after her sister.
Whilst they are in the nightclub the storm breaks with a ferocity not seen in living memory.
During the storm a large and rusting ship is washed up onto the beach. Early the next day the ship has already been removed from the beach and taken to a dock area where it is guarded. But why? Why would the authorities be interested in restricting access to an old, rusting hulk of a ship?
With the connivance of a friend of Vincent they manage to access the ship and Robyn finds something that seems, on the fact of it, to be utterly impossible. Almost magical, in fact. She pockets it before they have to flee the ship.
However, afterwards Robyn learns that her mother has had to travel to the hospital in London with Alice because Alice's illness has struck again.
Vincent decides to travel with Robyn to London. They learn that the trains to London are all cancelled due to the storm. No problem! They'd get the coach. but the coaches are all cancelled, too.
On the spur of the moment Vincent decides that he would steal a motor scooter for them and they would ride to London. When they discover that the road to London has also been cancelled, that it ceases to exist not many miles out of Brighton they realise that all they know and remember about their lives including remembered trips to London probably never really happened.
The land between Brighton and where London should be is filled with row after row of polytunnels in which plants are growing.
If there is no London where have her sister and her mother gone? And why does Robyn keep meeting people who she thinks she should know, but doesn't?
After Vincent is savaged and seriously wounded by a polar bear which Robyn is able to kill, with Vincent's shotgun, she finds herself in hospital and meets her sister.
Suddenly Robyn is back in reality. Or is she? She has split up from Vincent (apparently) and Robyn begins to realise that things are just not right. And what's wrong with feeding the penguins of Brighton with the odd muffin or two?
She keeps on being able to look back into the past and begins to learn that things just don't look right and that she and her new (old?) friends must work together to combat a dreadful, evil enterprise. And what is the role of her mother in this? And what did happen to her father?
But now Robyn has to fight for her new cause, for Vincent, her sister and the baby girl that Robyn is now carrying.
The book is published at £8.99 in paperback and £14.99 by Red Dog Press https://www.reddogpress.co.uk.
You can buy it direct from Red Dog Press, Amazon and other retailers.
This is the best science fiction novel I have read in many years. I think British Science Fiction has an important new voice in Helen Trevorrow.
How good is it? I would wake up in the middle of the night and instead of going back to sleep I thought "I'll just turn the light on and read a couple more chapters."
