Not Alone is the story of the harrowing journey of a mother and son, fighting for survival and a future, in a world ravaged by environmental disaster. After an encounter with an unseemly man who can't seem to take no for an answer, she and her son Harry leave to try to find her fiancé Jack, whose final note she found years too late. We know Katie is raising a little boy named Harry and they've made their little apartment their entire world, and she's been keeping him safe and fed for 5 years.

Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here. Katie ventures out in risky scouting missions for food to ensure their survival, resulting in a chance encounter with a group of survivors putting she and Harry at risk. Wanting to soften his understanding, Katie assures him, “You get to live every day, you only die once.and the atmospheric descriptions of a world wiped out by a microplastic storm place you right in the thick of this dark and terrifying post-apocalyptic setting. The toxicity of plastic dust is probably something we should worry about, although perhaps for now, a bit less than Katie does.

It's something she never would have risked, if it weren't for a renewed glimmer of hope that her lost fiancé, Jack, may not have died during the storm as she previously believed.

If the MC had trained him not to be afraid of the dark, if he had learned to live with hunger and thirst and put his mask and boots on at all times, and be afraid of the dirt and the water instead of these imaginary fucking “nasties”. Katie has become expert at foraging food from surviving plants and trapping rabbits, foxes, sometimes a dog. So she goes off and drags her kid through all these dangers and hazards where she might die and leave him alone at any time. Jackson's debut novel is stronger when it's surprising, as in the scenes where Katie muses on the strange beauty of the new world. Katie, one of those survivors, lives in isolation with her son Harry, who was born after the storm, in a flat outside London.

The note describes his destination and explains how she can get there with the resources he secreted away. Part dire warning, part love song, Not Alone explores how, like a tree bending toward sunlight, life may endure if our worst climate nightmares become reality. She’s becoming desperate for Harry’s future without her when she discovers a note that Jack had hidden away.Jackson’s debut novel, Not Alone, finds a new refreshing environmental disaster to worry about: toxic plastic dust.

The bodies begin to build up around them and layers of poisonous dust hang heavily in the air, seeping into the soil and slowly killing anything attempting to cling onto the natural world. There are new threats to their safety here, fellow survivors who are determined to start a new population, to save the world they so desperately misunderstood. Somehow this micro plastic fiasco effects women significantly more than it effects men, and the book never attempts to explain this even a little bit. Michaelides seems also to be dipping into the world of Edgar Allan Poe, offering an unreliable narrator who feels more like a literary exercise.

Katie forages while Harry, who was born after the storm and knows nothing of life Before, lives in relative fear of anything outside the confines of their small London flat. The flashbacks to the apocalyptic storm came too late to create the tension I wanted to see, and I struggled to connect to the mother/child relationship (which had been one of the selling points). I'm not sure how to rate this, because as I enjoyed the plot of the book, there was so many things I did not enjoy about this book.