Set in the near future,The Ice People imagines an ice age enveloping the Northern Hemisphere. It is Africa's relative warmth that offers a last hope to northerly survivors. As relationships between men and women break down, the novel charts one man's struggle to save his alienated son and bring him to the south and to salvation.

Maggie Gee is the author ofThe White Family, shortlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, andThe Flood, longlisted for the Orange Prize. She is the first female chair of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in London.