I needed to rant about this, so beware.

This is just stupid. Nothing make sense in this book. It's fine on the sentence level but the world building is bad and logic is off. Characters are inconsistent in their behaviour and it's s hard to understand them. Relationships and dialogues seemed forced. Also the pacing is so wierd. Time passes in some akward chunks. 

Speculative fiction is hard to write because you need to be quiet imaginative and inventive but it is important that the speculations are convincible and have some logic behind them. It's not enough to say this is like that or the situation is this. Show it! If it's about climate change that is already happening, things you're writing about need to make reader think that they are plausable in the future if this or that happen like that. The city is polutted - what is polluting it? What political choices allowed this to happen? Why are you referring just to one city? And what is making people stay in the city? Is there some fascist leadership in charge? I need the context to empathize with characters and to get some depth. We get only snippets of this world, both outside and inside the border of supposed Wilderness state. Like people are doing this or that in order to survive in nature but how did they learned to do that coming from the urban area? Just by being outdoors? By instinct? At the end of the book the author is acknowledging some sources of nomadic communities but it didn't feel like it was based on anything real.

At the end I don't know what was the purpose of this book.
And it was longlisted for the Booker??