Lynn McBride's guide to surviving in the Yukon:

Step One. Forget about life in Alaska. Don't think about microwaves, pizza, chocolate, movies, summer, the flu pandemic, or your dad - his sunken eyes, frail knuckles. That world's gone. Move on. You're a survivor.

Step Two. Learn to hunt, gut, clean, and cook animals without ralfing.

Step Three. Learn to live with the cold, the uncomfortable cabins, and the snow, snow, and more snow.

Step Four. Protect what's left of your family. Even if it means travelling with a stranger into the frozen north to help find and kill a man you know nothing about.

Step Five. Trust no-one.

Narrated by Lynn, a 23-year-old who was 12 when war and flu struck and she, her uncle, her mother and her brother left their town in Alaska for the remote Yukon territory. Since then she's grown up in isolation, a surly neighbour three miles away the only human contact outside her family.

When she runs into a stranger and his dog while out hunting one day everything changes. Jax stays with them while recovering from an injury, and when, a week later, a group of four men show up looking for him he kills three of them and runs off to catch the fourth before he can bring more men back.

Lynn and her uncle Jeryl go with him, and Jax explains that they are bad men who want to run experiments on him because of his superhuman strength. Their eventual confrontation with the group of men changes their small family outpost forever.