‘With elegance and humanity, Migraine sheds light on some of our darkest and most urgent questions… What type of life can we hope to build in the aftermath of collapse? How might we love one another when we are walled off by the solitude of pain?’ Keiran Goddard

Opening in East London, Migraine follows two men as they cross the weather-ravaged city pursuing a doomed love.

The snow has melted, but the thaw reveals a world transformed. London is in ruins, its population a fraction of its pre-freeze level. The weather has become wildly unpredictable – huge pressure swings leading to powerful localised storms. And this has led to an epidemic of migraine. When a storm hits, the pain comes, along with a wide range of visual and haptic hallucinations named migraine ‘aura’.

The novel starts with Ellis, one of a very small proportion of the population who don’t suffer from weather-induced migraines, being struck by a migraine attack for the first time. After being blinded by hallucinations, he wakes in a ruined bookshop with its former owner, Sam, who pulled him to safety from the storm. No longer excluded from the migraine epidemic, Ellis decides to find his ex-girlfriend, Luna, and win her back. With Sam tagging along, he sets out from the bookshop and heads south.

Compelling and insightful, Migraine is concerned with questions such as: what does a society look like, if it’s organised around chronic pain? What kind of culture would this set of conditions produce?

‘Stunning, insightful, deeply humane prose . . . Fisher indicts all of us yet still offers hope that we may change the ending of this story’ Olivia Sudjic

A young man is found brutally murdered in the middle of the snowed-in village of Wivenhoe. Over his body stands another man, axe in hand. The gathered villagers must deal with the consequences of an act that no-one tried to stop.

WIVENHOE is a haunting novel set in an alternate present, in a world that is slowly waking up to the fact that it is living through an environmental disaster. Taking place over twenty-four hours and told through the voices of a mother and her adult son, we see how one small community reacts to social breakdown and isolation.

Samuel Fisher imagines a world, not unlike our own, struck down and on the edge of survival. Tense, poignant, and set against a dramatic landscape, WIVENHOE asks the question: if society as we know it is lost, what would we strive to save? At what point will we admit complicity in our own destruction?

A young man is found brutally murdered in the middle of the snowed-in village of Wivenhoe. Over his body stands another man, axe in hand. The gathered villagers must deal with the consequences of an act that no-one tried to stop.

WIVENHOE is a haunting novel set in an alternate present, in a world that is slowly waking up to the fact that it is living through an environmental disaster. Taking place over twenty-four hours and told through the voices of a mother and her adult son, we see how one small community reacts to social breakdown and isolation.

Samuel Fisher imagines a world, not unlike our own, struck down and on the edge of survival. Tense, poignant, and set against a dramatic landscape, WIVENHOE asks the question: if society as we know it is lost, what would we strive to save? At what point will we admit complicity in our own destruction?