The dome was built so 2,500 people could colonize the harshest and least inhabited part of the world, the high Arctic. No one planned for the world to the south to explode. For years, Sam Plutarch has run the corporation's Arctic dome the way a farmer walks his fields: checking, listening, trusting the systems humming beneath the bio-glass. Inside there is warmth, a thriving colony, his wife Ludie's kitchen, his children's future. Life at 73° North Latitude is defined by extreme high-Arctic conditions. It endures perpetual summer daylight, then months of total winter darkness, and freezing temperatures. Survival depends on support from the South. World war breaks out, then the war goes nuclear. And the power hub begins to cough. As the machines falter, Sem confronts an arithmetic no engineer can fix: the dome cannot keep them all alive forever. But across the ice lies a village whose people have thrived in the Arctic for a thousand years without a single pane of bio-glass; people the dome's builders never thought to ask about anything. What follows is not a war for survival but something harder: an exodus, a reckoning, and a slow apprenticeship to a land the dome was designed to shut out. Some will make the journey south. Some will stay behind with the failing machine they love. And two fathers will watch their sons choose differently than they did. Spare, humane, and quietly devastating, Seventy-Three North is a dystopian novel about what technology cannot replace, what communities owe the ground they stand on, and the difference between surviving a place and belonging to it. For readers of Station Eleven, The Wall, and The Road.
