The Last Day by Andrew Hunter Murray
Set in a dystopian near-future, Andrew Hunter Murray's The Last Day is a semi-political thriller that reminds me a bit of Robert Harris's Fatherland. But whereas Fatherland imagines a Britain in which the Nazis won the Second World War, The Last Day speculates on what would happen if the Earth literally stopped turning. What that means, of course, is that one half of the world is scorched by endless sunshine and the other is shrouded in darkness and perpetually cold. The only part of the world that seems able to sustain human life and agriculture seems to be a slice of Europe, and Britain has become a primarily isolationist state. Coastal defences keep out potential refugee ships and the nation survives on food grown in 'the Breadbasket' - farms in mainland Europe tended by prisoners. Eleanor Hopper, our protagonist, hasn't set foot on British soil for a long time - instead, she works on ocean rigs with the army, researching the sea currents that are part of the
