Getting to know him a little better, as we and Hig do, is one of the rewards provided by The Dog Stars. Even Bangley, ostensibly one of those survivalists who lives in a bunker and shoots anything that moves, is not everything he seems. Hig’s relationship with Jasper is both joyful and poignant. Some of the things that Hig is driven to do are simply horrible and the regret that he suffers for his pragmatism is painful to observe. Hig has a sense of humour and a consciousness of how ridiculously tragic it has all become. He invites us in with the sparsest of language, each word carefully selected. Not just for the poetry of its prose but for the connection that it forges between the reader and Hig. Hig is obsessed by a voice he once heard over the Cessna radio and when something happens to trigger a change he sets off to find its source, going beyond the point of no return, like an Amelia Earhart, and finds more than he can have expected. What he’s really doing is searching for life – the signs of recovery, mourning his wife and unborn child but existing in each moment and finding a beauty in it, accompanied by his faithful dog, Jasper. Hig and Bangley carry on together in a type of marriage, not really communicating, but patrolling their property, hunting deer and, in Hig’s case, circling the area in his plane searching for danger approaching. The few who survive are mostly just a step away from death, courtesy of the the persistent blood virus or the guns and axes of fellow survivalists.

Deer seem to cope with the heat but the rivers are emptying of their fish and the skies of birds just as the world has emptied itself of people.

More than 99% of the population are gone, wiped out by a flu and blood virus nine years before, and the earth itself is increasingly ravaged by global warming. He is now a widower, hunter, survivor, existing on the edges of a great wood, marooned in a hanger along with his Cessna plane (the Beast), his beloved dog Jasper and his survivalist neighbour Bangley. The life it portrays is that of Hig, a 40-year-old who was once a poet, husband, expectant father, living a busy life in the city, going to the cinema, shopping, reading, doing everything that you and I may do. It is written almost as a stream of consciousness in sparse, broken, rarely punctuated prose.

The Dog Stars is not your usual type of novel, apocalyptic or otherwise.

The dog stars review