In 1986, with Chernobyl smouldering on the news and the Cold War casting a deep shadow, Scott becomes convinced that nuclear conflict is inevitable. Sensitive, watchful, and haunted by personal grief, he immerses himself in post-apocalyptic stories and survival games, drawn to the clarity they offer when the future feels out of control. Jodie is brilliant, abrasive, damaged. Fiercely determined to keep the world at arm’s length, she wears loneliness like armour, trusting her solitude to protect her. Drawn together by their fears, Jodie and Scott form an uneasy, wary alliance. But the closer they become, the more it seems that preparing for World War Three together may be their only chance to survive the personal apocalypses that are already engulfing them. The Glass Field is an intimate, quietly unsettling novel about what we cling to when the world feels close to breaking.
A literary novel set in late-Cold-War Britain, following two adolescents whose shared fear of nuclear catastrophe draws them into an intense and unsettling relationship. As preparation becomes a way of coping, imagination and reality begin to blur.
