MARTIN VOPENKA’S previous novel The Fifth Dimension is a troubling, comfortless and problematic book — and that description largely applies to the Czech writer’s latest, in an astringent translation by Anna Bryson Gustova.

Written from the viewpoint of protagonist Marek, My Brother the Messiah weaves back and forth across the decades of a dystopian 22nd century.

During that time, a botched technological attempt to arrest global warming has resulted instead in a new ice age. As polar conditions spread southwards, massive European migrations begin as Scandinavians head to the centre of the continent and then, as conditions worsen, whole Czech and Austrian populations escape in turn to Greece.