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Mirror Book Club members have chosen a brand-new book of the month – Happy All The Time by Laurie Colwin. In the coastal resort of Margate, hotels lie empty and sun-faded ‘For Sale’ signs line the streets. The sea is higher – it’s higher everywhere – and those who can are moving inland. A young girl called Chance, however, is just arriving. Your mum, Maggie Gee, has written on similar themes, most recently in The Red Children . Is there any kind of rivalry between the two of you about who gets to tell speculative stories set on the Kent coast? The setting is Margate, sometime in the all too near future. “Shoreditch-on-Sea”, as it once was known, has gone from offering “charity shops, chip shops, shut shops” to food banks and “kem”, a drug on which the locals are hooked. Narrator Chance arrived as a small child, funded by the government to leave an overcrowded London along with her protective big brother, JD, and Jas, their young mother, an art school dropout whose brightness is dimmed by addiction. Eventually, JD’s pumped-up, volatile business partner, Kole, joins their band and later a baby boy named Blue arrives. ‘Liquid grace’: Rosa Rankin-Gee. is touted as the deadline for the world to go carbon neutral and preserve natural habitats. How optimistic are you that we’ll make it?
Dreamland — Rosa Rankin-Gee
In their new home, they find space and wide skies, a world away from the cramped bedsits they’ve lived in up until now. But challenges swiftly mount. JD’s business partner, Kole, has a violent, charismatic energy that whirlpools around him and threatens to draw in the whole family. And when Chance comes across Franky, a girl her age she has never seen before – well-spoken and wearing sunscreen – something catches in the air between them. Their fates are bound: a connection that is immediate, unshakeable, and, in a time when social divides have never cut sharper, dangerous. CHARLIE CONNELLY on a superb new novel which creates a horrifyingly plausible near-future for Margate. Chance’s life is filled with poverty, crime, drugs and fear – until she meets Franky, a girl unlike anyone else she knows. She is also buoyed up by meeting Franky, a mysterious young woman who is clearly from outside of Margate, a Londoner Chance rightly guesses who has access to everything Chance does not, and who becomes a lifeline of love for a young woman whose experience of Cupid’s core commodity has been tainted at best, murderously ruinous at worst (save of course for Blue, her best friend Davey and her mother when she’s at her best).He goes on to consider The Sahel, a region below the Sahara, which has seen an estimated 3.8million people displaced in recent years, many seeking to reach Europe, and that number is only set to climb. Our reviewer found it hard to imagine reading a better book this year after finishing the wonderfully entertaining and lucid account of how 10 key world regions are likely to shape our futures. Was anger at government policy a major spark for the novel, or was it more a case of imagining how a familiar landscape might come to be known by future generations? I think that brings us to your last near-future dystopia book recommendation, which is Z for Zachariah by Robert C O’Brien. It was completed by his wife and daughter posthumously.
Mirror Book Club: The Power Of Geography a fascinating look Mirror Book Club: The Power Of Geography a fascinating look
I can’t stress enough how much I loved this book. The story was incredibly gripping, there wasn’t a dull moment, it drew me in right at the start. I loved all the characters, flaws and all, it made them feel so real, like they were people you knew or had met before somehow.
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Dystopian, speculative fiction with a gorgeous and intense queer love story, complex family dynamics and characters with so much heart. A combination of both – we are simultaneously experiencing a housing crisis and a climate crisis. In this country, they haven’t come close to peaking – or clashing together – in full force yet, but they will, and it will be devastating. Dreamland brings us face-to-face with much of what we’re on the threshold of losing; nevertheless, it manages to convince us that its characters have everything still to live for.” Guardian A love story. A tragedy. A warning. The story of one girl and an entire society. At the same time, terrifying and hopeful. Dreamland takes the familiar and twists it a couple of degrees to show a disturbing and disturbingly credible picture of our possible future. What will happen if we keep ignoring climate change, allow inequalities to widen, allow eugenics to creep into the mainstream and build walls? As the space race gathers pace, and great powers including the US, Russia and China integrate space warfare into their military budgets, it is increasingly likely to become another source of geopolitical tension.
Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee | Goodreads Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee | Goodreads
Oh. My. God. I've just finished this book and immediately want to read it again. I couldn't put it down, yet wanted to read it slowly to make it last.
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What kept me going was Chance, the main character of the book. The book is filled with complicated, difficult to like people but Chance loves all of them in her own way. She has this desperate desire to trust and to help, even when it's clear that she shouldn't. Nobody thanks for it and it ends up hurting her in many different ways, each more heartbreaking than the last. But her perseverance and loving heart is properly inspiring. So Australia finds itself adjacent to the economic powerhouse of the 21st century and keen to play a bigger role on the global stage. The big question is who they will choose to play with. The book is an insightful look into the way society views individuals and ranks them based on their financial value over a more humanist approach. The judgement placed on those in need, totally dismissing the impact of access to resources, as well as the ease with which people can turn on others to save themselves.
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