Migraine

'An essential contribution to modern storytelling' Emma Glass
'With elegance and humanity, Migraine sheds light on some of our darkest and most urgent questions... What type of life can we hope to build in the aftermath of collapse? How might we love one another when we are walled off by the solitude of pain?' Keiran Goddard
Opening in East London, Migraine follows two men as they cross the weather-ravaged city pursuing a doomed love.
The snow has melted, but the thaw reveals a world transformed. London is in ruins, its population a fraction of its pre-freeze level. The weather has become wildly unpredictable - huge pressure swings leading to powerful localised storms. And this has led to an epidemic of migraine. When a storm hits, the pain comes, along with a wide range of visual and haptic hallucinations named migraine 'aura'.
The novel starts with Ellis, one of a very small proportion of the population who don't suffer from weather-induced migraines, being struck by a migraine attack for the first time. After being blinded by hallucinations, he wakes in a ruined bookshop with its former owner, Sam, who pulled him to safety from the storm. No longer excluded from the migraine epidemic, Ellis decides to find his ex-girlfriend, Luna, and win her back. With Sam tagging along, he sets out from the bookshop and heads south.
Compelling and insightful, Migraine is concerned with questions such as: what does a society look like, if it's organised around chronic pain? What kind of culture would this set of conditions produce?

Samuel Fisher is a writer, bookseller and publisher. His debut novel, The Chameleon (Salt, 2018) was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize, shortlisted for the Collyer Bristow Prize and won a Betty Trask in 2019. His second novel Wivenhoe was published by Corsair in 2022. He co-owns Burley Fisher Books in Hackney and is a director of Peninsula Press.