Cold People: From the multi-million copy bestselling author of Child 44

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Original and imaginative, as profoundly intimate as it is grand in scope, Cold People is a masterful and unforgettable epic. An armada of alien spacecraft has invaded Earth and given humankind exactly 30 days to move to Antarctica. I also didn’t like that we don’t learn the purpose of the alien takeover and the complete surrender of humankind without question. Because as they cling to life on the ice, the remnants of their past swept away, they must also confront the urgent challenge: can they change and evolve rapidly enough to ensure humanity’s future?

In Hope Town, a ramshackle settlement one group of immigrants creates, the arts are "as important to survival as housing and food. No, we don’t get a single word about this, instead we skip to twenty years later and we get a few pages about the handsome Portuguese fella catching a whale in his fishing net and cutting it loose. I was pretty pleased to get an arc of this book: the only other book I’ve read by this author was Child 44 which I loved. The aliens carry out their threat for the majority of people that don’t make it to Antarctica and play no further part in the novel. It unfolds like a movie, so there was perhaps not quite as much character development as I usually prefer, but the story was engaging.The goal was to develop powerful beings that could withstand the cold and perform jobs that humans could not do in extreme climate.

Cold People follows the perilous journeys of a handful of those who endure the frantic exodus to the most extreme environment on the planet. A staggeringly beautiful alien armada had arrived, the moment many had pondered but few had ever thought would happen. I really enjoyed the themes of family and love, how the barren landscape was depicted and the absolute fear that leapt from the first third or so of the book.

Also the novel reflects on the ideology of love; what it is to be in love, to love in the romantic sense and also with familial love. This book is very different from the author's previous Child 44 trilogy (I haven't read any of his other books). Though he isn't present in every scene, he conveys each piece of the story leading up to the murder as if he were an omniscient narrator, capable of accessing every character's interior perspective. Still, enough have made it there safely to begin a new life within the three towns and one small city constructed from the scavenged parts of the ships and planes that brought them. Liza is an American, on holiday in Portugal, when she meets Atto, and their relationship is interesting, and we watch it develop through this crisis.

The premise is great but I was getting so angry at the lack of interest by the author in exploring any of this.I’d’ve thought it’d be top of most peoples’ conversation topics but I get it - the aliens aren’t really the point, they’re just the story catalyst.