About this deal
If you have been paying attention to the world of late, wrapped up rather despairingly as it is in pandemic, war, climate change and creeping intolerance and extremism, it will not surprise you that hope is in short supply for many people. That’s part of why I wrote a semi-dystopian novel in any case, and that’s why they are some of the books that I love and recommend most. Most of Margate’s shops are boarded up and the Turner Contemporary is a haven for drug users. Pubs open and shut at random, the booze subsidised to the point of being free to keep the locals docile along with the kem.
Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee | Goodreads
Perhaps appropriately, Dreamland is published exactly a century after T.S. Eliot sat in a seaside shelter close to Margate railway station and wrote part of The Waste Land: “On Margate Sands/ I can connect /Nothing with nothing./ The broken fingernails of dirty hands./ My people humble people who expect/ Nothing”. There is nothing fairytale about this world, which finds itself evoked in writing that is both searingly serious and unexpectedly funny (how else do you deal with day-to-day disappointments without a heady sense of the ridiculous), and Rankin-Gee never once pretends otherwise; however, the weight of so much misery and extremist hellishness does not then preclude any sense of optimism, however tenuous, which finds expression in ways that will surprise and enthrall you.It is proof that while these two qualities are often rendered as rose-tinted, heartwarmingly light and bright things, they are in fact incredibly robust and tenacious, as far from a sweet ditty in a cloying animated feature film as its possible to get. A beautiful book: thought-provoking, eerily prescient and very witty.’ Brit Bennett, author of The Vanishing Half I don’t know. There are so many scenes, and most of them seem frozen now. My mum too — I’d freeze her right then if I could. After we got the news about her parents, she decided, she told us, to relax a little. Which meant go out more. There were nights when she came home with blood on her top, or no shoes on — with Liam, without him — but she was still just about on the edge of being okay then. 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?
Dreamland: A warning from Britain’s post-Brexit future Dreamland: A warning from Britain’s post-Brexit future
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.
And throughout this accomplished book, the reader is frequently reminded that a new empire is relentlessly extending its sinister reach – the superpower that is China, exploiting every opportunity to gain power and undermine its rival, the US. saw the publication of Maggie Gee’s tenth novel The Flood, a story of climate change written in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and featuring many of the social and political concerns of the early 2000s. Two decades on, and literally a generation later, it is fascinating to see Gee’s daughter Rosa Rankin-Gee exploring similar themes in her second novel, Dreamland.