Family on Ice - Richard Lowe

74,000 years ago, the Toba supervolcano erupted in what is now Sumatra, releasing more material than any eruption in the last two million years. The ash fell across continents. The sulfur aerosols it injected into the stratosphere reduced sunlight across Eurasia by as much as ninety percent. The cold did not break. The game moved wrong. The human species came within a generation of disappearing entirely.

Family on Ice is set in that winter.

Dak is a hunter who reads terrain the way other men read faces. His wife Sela counts everything - food, water, fuel, the days until the child she is carrying will arrive. Their daughter Fen ranges ahead and reports back, reading landscape faster than she can explain it. Their son Tev, eight years old, keeps counts of things no one asked him to count and produces results no one expected.

When the ash starts falling and the game disappears and the water sources go bad, this family must leave the bowl camp they have sheltered in for three winters and walk toward a glacier wall at the edge of the known world, where a river runs clean inside the ice and the wind stops at the base of something a thousand feet high.

The journey takes them through tribal politics, an alliance they didn't choose, the death of people they love, a river crossing that nearly ends everything, and a volcanic winter that forces every calculation to be made again from the beginning.

Along the way they encounter the last Neanderthals - people built differently, who have been in this landscape longer, who know things about the ice and the cold that no one else alive knows. The contact between these two kinds of human is rendered without explanation or fantasy, entirely through behavior and gesture and the slow accumulation of shared work.

Family on Ice is a literary survival novel in the tradition of spare, character-driven fiction. McCarthy-influenced in its prose style - no quotation marks, rotating point of view, declarative sentences that carry enormous weight - it never condescends to its people or explains their world to the reader. These are fully intelligent human beings operating without our tools, in a landscape that is ending, walking toward something none of them have seen.

The novel asks what a family is when everything else is gone. It answers in the only way the evidence supports: they keep going.