Marcel Theroux is the author of three previous novels, A Blow to the Heart, A Stranger in the Earth, and The Paperchase, winner of the 2002 Somerset Maugham Award. He lives in London.

Every day I buckle on my guns and go out to patrol this dingy city.

Out on the far northern border of a failed state, Makepeace patrols the ruins of a dying city and tries to keep its unruly inhabitants in check.

Into this cold, isolated world comes evidence that life is flourishing elsewhere - a refugee from the vast emptiness of forest, whose existence inspires Makepeace to take to the road to reconnect with human society.

What Makepeace finds is a world unravelling, stockaded villages enforcing a rough and uncertain justice, mysterious slave camps labouring to harness the little understood technologies of a vanished civilization. But Makepeace's journey also leads to unexpected human contact, tenderness, and the dark secrets behind this frozen world.

FAR NORTH leads the reader on a quest through an unforgettable arctic landscape, from humanity's origins to its likely end. Bleak, haunting, spare - and yet ultimately hopeful, the novel is suffused with an ecstatic awareness of the world's fragility and beauty, and its unexpected ability to recover from our worst trespasses.