What if the only hope for survival becomes the greatest threat?

From the brilliant, bestselling author of  Child 44  comes a suspenseful and fast-paced novel about a colony of global apocalypse survivors seeking to reinvent civilisation under the most extreme conditions imaginable.

The world has fallen. Without warning, a mysterious and omnipotent force has claimed the planet for their own. There are no negotiations, no demands, no reasons given for their actions. All they have is a message: humanity has thirty days to reach the one place on Earth where they will be allowed to exist? Antarctica.

Cold People  follows the journeys of a handful of those who endure the frantic exodus to the most extreme environment on the planet. But their goal is not merely to survive the present. 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? Can they build a new society in the sub-zero cold?

Original and imaginative, as profoundly intimate as it is grand in scope,  Cold People  is a masterful and unforgettable epic.

Praise for Tom Rob Smith

‘A remarkable achievement’ Jeffery Deaver
‘Amazing’ Lee Child
‘Chilling, hypnotic and thoroughly compelling’ Mark Billingham
‘Truly original and chilling’ Jojo Moyes
‘Tom Rob Smith’s mastery of suspense will make any reader’s heart pound’ Financial Times
‘A thrilling, intense piece of fiction’ Observer
‘Ingeniously plotted… a high voltage story’ New York Times
‘Perfectly plotted, utterly terrifying’  Daily Mail
‘A mind-blowing, addictive plot that will have you on the edge of your seat’  Stylist
‘A powerful page-turner’  GQ
‘Taut and atmospheric’  Irish Independent
‘Masterly… read this and shiver’  Telegraph

Daniel believed that his parents were enjoying a peaceful retirement on a remote farm in Sweden, the country of his mother’s birth. But with a single phone call, everything changes.

Your mother… she’s not well, his father tells him. She’s been imagining things – terrible, terrible things.In fact, she has been committed to a mental hospital.

Before Daniel can board a plane to Sweden, his mother calls: Everything that man has told you is a lie. I’m not mad… I need the police… Meet me at Heathrow.

Presented with a horrific crime, a conspiracy that implicates his own father, Daniel must examine the evidence and decide: who is telling the truth, his mother or his father? And he has secrets of his own that for too long he has kept hidden…

When Leo’s worst fears are realised and a tragic murder destroys everything he loves, he demands only one thing: that he is allowed to investigate and find the killer who has struck at the heart of his family. Crippled by grief, his request denied, Leo sees no other option than to take matters into his own hands, thousands of miles from the crime scene.

In a surprising, thrilling story that spans decades and continents – from the backstreets of 1960s New York to the mountains of Afghanistan in the 1980s – Leo will stop at nothing as he hunts the one person who knows the truth: Agent 6.