Most of the world's major cities are inundated; a tsunami has wiped out houses, shops and schools along the Hartlepool shoreline. And now the authorities are walling in the flood zone… Seventeen-year-old Zoe, knocked unconscious during the sudden flood, cannot recall her name and can only summon flashes of her immediate past. Zoe meets Alma, who has a mysterious link to global entrepreneur & opportunist Volk Volkov, himself a refugee: of his own past, and of a Soviet prison camp. But will Alma and Volk's drama trap Zoe in The Zone? The ancient past and possible future collide with Creationists, environmentalists, former prisoners, flood tourists and feral castaways in Eliza Mood's rollicking survival story set in the near future. O Man of Clay is a finely imagined and complex dystopian novel about an England of the future overwhelmed by environmental catastrophe. Like the best novels set in the future, this one is really about our miserable, dismal, toxic present and its message is salutary, prescient and terrifying. The writing is also very, very good. Carlo Gébler, novelist