I saw an announcement in the Climate Fiction Writers League newsletter last month (or whenever… times seems more and more elastic as I get older, but also more brittle, too, at other moments) that announced that one of the CFWL members, Nicky Singer, had died, and that she had written The Survival Game. This small announcement had characterized The Survival Game as a seminal work of climate fiction. Dead writer, seminal work, how could I resist?

I’m glad I didn’t resist.

The Survival Game, first published in the U.K. in 2018, by Hodder and Stoughton, is a quick read, with a plain style, but an entirely effective one. The cast of characters is slim, with mainly the fourteen-year-old female protagonist and a mute five- or six-year-old boy, although many others come and go throughout the novel. The situation is a chilling one—no, a hot one, actually—in that climbing heat has made life in the Global South, and especially the latitudes on each side of the Equator, oppressive, both because of the high-ranging temperatures, but also because of the political instabilities famine and mass migration, will produce.

The book starts somewhere in northern England as the girl makes her way toward an island of Scotland, and having started out in Sudan, trekking to Cairo, and finally, to Heathrow, thanks to her Global North Citizen papers, the early part of the long journey is effectively compressed and shown through the memories and thoughts of the girl. Singer uses a clever device to suggest the traumas experienced by the girl throughout her ordeal, and the way this is handled is worth the book price in and of itself.

The reader quickly sees a fierce and intelligent competence in the main character as she navigates off-road to avoid patrols and drones that can mean internment camps for migrants, and as you should imagine, life as a dispossessed climate migrant is difficult. She ends up reluctantly taking the young boy along with her, and barriers multiply, including that Scotland has gained independence, which means more checkpoints and camps. Border frenzy even extends to her childhood home of Arran, a large island off the west coast of Scotland, which has its own immigrant control. There is great imagining of what migrant camps and bureaucratic systems thereof would be like.

The novel is touching and the theme of what it is to be human is carried through to a surprising but moving conclusion. The age of the girl is well played and her efforts to reach her grandmother’s house with the younger boy in tow brings further depth to the portrait of a world in collapse due to climate change and in ways that will have you thinking—however reluctantly—that, yeah, this could happen. Of course, in many instances, this is already happening, just not to such a global scale… yet.