Dystopia? Or something uncomfortably close to the Britain we know today, where MPs pose beaming for the cameras at the opening of a constituency food bank? This is one of the great skills employed by Rankin-Gee in Dreamland, creating a vividly grim future that is never less than plausible.

Dreamland by Rankin Gee Rosa - AbeBooks Dreamland by Rankin Gee Rosa - AbeBooks

It is the repository of untold secrets and last seen on Taryn’s grandfather’s bookshelves – so the searchers are convinced Taryn knows its whereabouts. From 1st July 2021, VAT will be applicable to those EU countries where VAT is applied to books - this additional charge will be collected by Fed Ex (or the Royal Mail) at the time of delivery. Shipments to the USA & Canada:The narration is extraordinarily well done. Many post-apocalyptic books have a spareness and sparseness that can sometimes feel affected. This feels incredibly naturalistic, and yet manages to be very lyrical. One review I read talked about it having a haiku-like quality. It has these clipped sentences, in a way that feels hyper-realistic to how minds think. It’s effortlessly beautiful while being violent and harrowing. Margate in particular has seen its fortunes become decidedly mixed in recent decades. By the 1980s the once thriving holiday destination saw its hotels and guesthouses being converted into cheap bedsits, where there was money to be made by landlords trousering government money to house the poor and vulnerable displaced from London and other parts of the south-east by a combination of austerity and the ever-rising cost of living. Rosa: A book takes a long time! Or it does for me anyway. You have to be interested in – close to obsessed with – so many different elements of the world and story to get through the marathon of it. Place was, as it often is for me, the starting point. Margate, past and present, weird and hard and beautiful, emblematic of the tidal high-and-low nature of the British seaside. I knew I wanted to write that. I knew I wanted it to be in the close future, I knew I wanted to write a love story between two young women, and really try and pin down in words the extraordinary, blinding power of that. The abject horror of current political leaders, and the way the class system affects every element of life in Britain – I want to write socially realistic novels, so those things can’t be avoided.

Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee | Waterstones Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee | Waterstones

Franky’s arrival awakens something long lost, if it was ever present at all, in Chance, the sense that one person can unconditionally change your life and make it better in a way that a hundred broken-into homes cannot.

Dreamland is set in the near future, a dystopian novel that highlights some very real potential threats to the UK and its seaside towns. Chance is our main character, from a poor family suffering in London who are given the seemingly optimistic opportunity to move to Margate and start a new life. The realities of this move drag Chance’s family into a situation that is just as bad as before, but with some added drama too. A content warning for sustained drug use, domestic abuse, suicide and death is definitely needed! They are handled well, but run graphically through the book – so just be aware! 🙂 Although Rankin-Gee’s nuanced, astute world building deserves applause, it’s this relationship that holds the novel together, in large part because it feels so real. She vividly captures the balance between ferocity and vulnerability as the two girls explore their burgeoning desire; one minute they’re greedy for each other, the next they’re proceeding more gingerly. Theirs is a great first love, blazing bright and furious amid the poverty and the pain, the perfect counterweight that’s needed to make the novel sing. 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. Dystopian, speculative fiction with a gorgeous and intense queer love story, complex family dynamics and characters with so much heart. He got away with everything,” says Caleb, probably the closest Chance will have to a father figure. “All this call-me-by-my-first-name, I’ll-drink-a-pint-with-you bulls**t.” It’s a contemporary novel, about a gay man and gay woman who fall in love, but it’s also – in a prequel-esque way – within the Dreamland universe. I’m having a lot of fun with it.

Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee review – seat-edge tension in

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). The world is going to hell in a handbasket, politicians are corrupt, the rich get richer at the expense of the poor, and global warming is going to kill us all.The Mirror's travel newsletter brings you the latest news and expert analysis from across the industry, as well as plenty of travel inspiration. Books featuring dystopian or post-apocalyptic themes offer us an opportunity to study human nature outside of the normal structure of society, says Rosa Rankin-Gee, author of the acclaimed novel Dreamland. Here, she recommends five other books featuring a near-future dystopia, all of which explore a societal or cultural unraveling through beautiful prose. As Jessie Greengrass said during the book festival event, facing the reality of climate change is a lot like confronting the inevitability of your own death. That's incredibly hard to manage and I don't blame novelists for ending books more gently and ambivalently than with 'They died'. I find it interesting to observe this trend, though. Climate change novels have only become more common in the five or so years - prior to that I looked for and struggled to find them. The recent ones I've read ( Kim Stanley Robinson aside) explore the immediate impacts through personal narratives rather than a polyphonic multiple narrator structure. I wonder if (and would like to think that) this is a first stage in Western fictional processing of the climate crisis and that we'll soon see more sprawling epics and attempts to write ourselves better futures. The ambiguous endings make for a more comfortable reading experience, while also slightly letting the reader off the hook. They leave space for the hope that everything will turn out OK on a personal level without massive socioeconomic change, so readers can assume this if inclined to. Based on the scientific evidence, I don't think that's remotely plausible and we in the rich world need to accept that massive change is happening whether we like it or not.

Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee review – first love and rising

On to Ethiopia which, with 12 large lakes and nine major rivers, is empowered by water. Its neighbours are reliant Dreamland is up there with the bleakest books I've read to the point of almost being overwhelming. It imagines a not too distant future where patterns relocating people living in London council houses and climate change merge together with catastrophic consequences. The dread and horror is unrelenting, while also hitting a little too close to home. Ha, I love that distinction. First up, we have The Dog Stars by Peter Heller. It’s a post-pandemic novel. Could you tell us about why you admire it?

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He sat with me for an hour. Fed me chocolate. Kept saying I was an idiot. I kept saying I was an idiot too, and that he was. I don’t know why we said that to each other so much all through our lives. Maybe because we both always knew we weren’t. Somehow he managed to make me laugh too. We both laughed. I can’t remember what about. Fear, euphoria — they’re weirdly close together sometimes.” (P. 298) 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. Pessimistic forecasts put 2037, which is where the main part of the story takes place, at 2 ft+, but it’s not linear or predictable. There are lots of terrifying potential tipping points. Steady declines, and then cliff-edges. Whether it’s the sky or the light or something else altogether Thanet still feels like elsewhere, somewhere separate, still carrying the sensations and name of an island even though the channel that once cut it adrift silted up half a millennium ago. You can barely see the join now, but you can definitely feel it. Set in about 20 years time in a post COVID world, this is an immersive, thought provoking read which is often darkly comic.