Denis Klamm, feckless scion of two former Leaders, returns to the Island for his father's funeral, only to find it sinking. Or the sea rising – it depends what you believe. Either way, they're all going to drown – unless the young, idealistic and newly-elected Leader, Jessica King, really is the saviour long foretold by Our Island Story.

But Jessica is only Leader because Ari Spencer, the special advisor's special advisor, has made it so. She wants solutions; Ari offers schemes. She wants to solve the climate crisis, house the homeless and bring justice for the victims of police brutality in a decade-old incident that Ari, for reasons of his own, would rather nobody looked at too closely. Or at all.

While Denis falls under Jessica's spell and sets out to make the sort of grand romantic gesture guaranteed to attract attention, Ari hatches a plot to pit conspiracy theory against myth, unleashing a maelstrom of populism, ambition, religion, treachery, lawlessness, old wounds and new battles – along with the less familiar forces of love and grief. It won't save the Island, but it might just save his skin.

The result sweeps cynical politicians and bureaucrats, corrupt policemen, ambitious clerics, former Soviet taxi drivers and would-be poets into a riotous, brutal and surprisingly touching black comedy about our refusal to face reality, even – especially – when it's about to kill us.