You did feel sorry for Cold People, and there's the rub: they are often described as being unemotional.

As the story progresses it dawns on the reader that these monsters, with their high intelligence and superior physiques, signify a need to reassess what it is to be human. Unfortunately, I found myself dissappointed multiple times with the direction of the book as it continued. I turned back, deciding I didn't want to eat badly enough to continue and spent some time thawing out my painful gloved hands in warm water. I felt like character development could be improved but the writing was pleasurable and I appreciated the journey!It's a meager existence, featuring lots of fish soup, tea and “tobacco” from lichen scraped off rocks, soap from walrus blubber, and clothing perpetually re-stitched and re-purposed.

Knowing that man cannot survive in that climate, the new community decides to embark on a program of genetic engineering to create people who can thrive in the ice – Cold People. Also the novel reflects on the ideology of love; what it is to be in love, to love in the romantic sense and also with familial love. However, the focus is not just on the day to day survival of the humans who made the journey, but the future survival of the human race in a place in which they are not meant to survive.I have read other reviews which say that the characters in this book were underdeveloped and they could make no connection with them. Michaelides takes a literary turn in his latest novel, employing an unreliable narrator, the structure of classical drama, and a self-conscious eye to dismantling the locked-room mystery.