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In Maria Takolander’s bleak and bold debut novel, the ground is rock hard and littered with the wreckage of civilisational collapse. When did the forests burn? Decades, possibly centuries, ago. The planet has warmed, the seas have risen, the topsoil has blown away. The epoch of mass extinctions is long past, and no one nurtures fantasies about renewing the Earth.

Some folks live on-grid in cities, provided power and water by the dysfunctional remnants of the state. The central character of The End of Romance, a mother, lives off-grid with her son, scavenging, foraging, trapping and pillaging to stay alive. She is named just once – Marianna – and her son, the boy, never. Marianna is illiterate, barely verbal, exhausted and intent on survival.

One hollow hope is granted the humans who eke out an existence on this desolate world: a better life on a planet called the Promised Land. This hope authorises the shadowy military-industrial government to send all boys to military school until they are 16, at which point they will be shipped off to fight a colonial war for the Promised Land. They never return. Mothers express their love for their sons by maiming them, amputating limbs and gouging out eyes in order to keep them.

A chance encounter with a feckless and lonely young man named Josip drives the machinery of plot in The End of Romance. How, Marianna must know, has Josip survived? If he managed to escape conscription, is there hope for her son? It may be fear of being turned over to the authorities that compels Josip to agree to lead her and the boy to the monastery where he grew up, and from which he was expelled. It may be loneliness – or a brutal, entitled desire.

Josip wears a stolen ecclesiastical ring in deluded homage to a lost patriarchy. He is a study in resentment, a post-apocalyptic incel convinced that the women he encounters, including Marianna, owe him both sex and respect. For much of the novel we are in the company of a travestied holy family – Marianna, Josip and the boy – as they travel to another promised land, a destination that no one, least not the reader, expects they will reach.

Leaving the city, the accumulated trash of generations past serves as a link to an uncomfortably familiar world: “the detritus of human existence – plastic bags and bottles, syringes and cigarette butts, white goods and broken plasterboard, car batteries and bicycles – was everywhere.” It’s our waste that abides, not our ideals. Their journey through the wastelands quickly takes on allegorical qualities, redolent of the fictions of JM Coetzee and Cormac McCarthy. Takolander is a poet and short story writer who makes use of every scrap of cultural detritus, crafting a symbolic landscape from the thorny plants, swarming insects and scrawny creatures her characters encounter.

The violent realities of this post-apocalyptic world emerge in shocking fragments. Josip stuns Marianna when he tells her he knew his father. It’s a lie. She’s stunned because “she’d never heard anyone mention their father before. She had no idea who had fathered her”. This is a population that reproduces itself through rape. Older schoolboys wearing black balaclavas roam the city in gangs, assaulting women with impunity. When Marianna comes across corpses in her scavenging, she plunders useful items from their homes before she reports the deaths to the “suicide box”, the state agency responsible for collecting bodies and cremating them.

Some humans may be able to survive on a planet that is two or three or four degrees hotter. They may form communities sufficiently resilient to endure an unpredictable climate and every kind of scarcity. But to survive in such a world requires abandoning romance. Marianna, a scavenger, is alert to what might be salvaged and repurposed from the wreckage; her world is disenchanted but she survives.

Not every reader will revel in the unstinting bleakness of The End of Romance. This novel offers nothing in the way of comic relief or palliative sentimentality. I take Takolander’s refusal to re-enchant the degraded world of her novel as a sign of her intellectual seriousness. Amitav Ghosh disparaged culture-makers for trafficking in “modes of concealment”, fictions that evade the terrible realities of the climate crisis. As we live through season after season of unprecedented weather, of warming oceans, melting ice, heatwaves, bushfires, freak storms, and as we continue to burn fossil fuels and consume more crap and dump it into unseen places, The End of Romance is a bracing rebuke to climate denialism and fantasies of easy adaptation.

In the world of this novel, domination, extraction and predation are the models for social relationships. And yet there are occasional glimpses of alternative forms of connection: between mothers and sons; to art and to animals, both human and more-than-human. If we approach The End of Romance as Marianna might, as a scavenger, the faintest coordinates for a different future emerge in these fragile and precious forms of interdependency. This is a tense, engrossing and deeply uncomfortable novel that speaks in urgent tones to our complacent moment.

• The End of Romance by Maria Takolander is out now through Text Publishing