A mysterious, unstoppable cold is spreading across the world, turning cities into frozen wastelands. Amidst this, there are three interwoven story-lines that gradually converge:
- A nameless narrator, a disaffected young man in London who becomes obsessed with a charismatic, enigmatic woman named Susan; their brief, intense affair is marked by a sense of impending doom that mirrors the encroaching frost.
- A British intelligence officer, John, is dispatched to investigate the strange climatic phenomenon and discovers a covert Soviet operation that may be deliberately engineering the freeze.
- A Russian immigrant named Sasha lives in a decaying apartment block in Moscow and becomes a reluctant witness to the government’s secret experiments with a cryogenic weapon.
As the ice spreads, communication breaks down, transportation collapses, and ordinary people are forced to confront the absurdity of a world turning to stone. The novel’s tone shifts between bleak realism and the surreal.
In the climax, the three protagonists’ paths intersect in a desolate, ice‑covered London where the narrator finally meets John and Sasha amid the ruins. Their brief collaboration reveals that the freeze is a self‑propagating natural disaster, not a weapon, and that humanity’s attempts to understand or halt it are hopeless.
The novel ends on a semi-positive note, with the ice receding as mysteriously as it arrived. The survivors have to pick up the pieces of what’s left behind. What stands out is the insignificance of man and his puny efforts against a literal force of nature, and how fragile the life we take for granted really is. A thought-provoking and slightly depressing read.