In 2021, infertility has spread like a plague, and no babies have been born for a quarter of a century anywhere in the inhabited world. The old are driven to despair and suicide, the young are beautiful, violent, and cruel, and the middle-aged try to sustain normality under the rule of the Warden of England. When Theo Faron, an Oxford historian, meets a women who is one of a group challenging the regime, he is drawn into unimaginable horrors.