Daughters of the North : A Novel
Author(s): Sarah Hall
From Booker and Orange Prize-nominated author Sarah Hall comes the tale of an imaginary England, a future dystopian society where the right to bear a child is determined by a state lottery system.
In this stunning novel Sarah Hall draws on the work of Margaret Atwood and George Orwell to imagine a dystopic England where terrifying new systems of control are in place and reproduction has become a lottery. When a girl known only as “Sister” escapes the confines of her increasingly repressive marriage to find an isolated group of women living on a remote northern farm, she must find out whether she has it in herself to become an active insurgent.
This fascinating novel considers what lengths women will go to in a brutalized world in order to resist their oppressors, what tactics they must employ to survive and remain free. But the story asks a wider and more difficult question: under what circumstances might an ordinary person become a terrorist?
Review(s):
“Hall’s novel is to be admired for its own slow grace.”
"A complex, tight work about hope springing out of resistance.”
“[A]mazing work. A terrific and original novel by a splendid new writer.”
“With echoes of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and P. D. James’s The Children of Men, Hall’s dystopian landscape is far too close for comfort, the confession form giving her prose an economy and urgency…The novel is, among other things, a meditation on the inequality and difference of gender.”
“Reminiscent of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian fable The Handmaid’s Tale, Hall’s third novel portrays an equally bleak future. Set in a flood-ravaged England, where food is in scant supply and reproduction is controlled by a dictatorship, one woman attempts to escape to a self-sufficient commune in Cumbria. But utopias have a habit of disintegrating, and she soon finds herself engaged in a very real battle against a repressive regime.”
“Hall’s sharp and vivid evocation of landscape has the value of rooting her dark fantasy in a recognizable rural world ... Although its narrative voice and political vision may be too bleak for many readers, the seriousness of Hall’s intent and the scale of her achievement are to be highly commended.”
“A community under threat was also the theme of Hall’s first novel Haweswater and she is an impressive writer on all the alliances, compromises and tensions of group living ... This is a violent novel, strange and unsettling. It terrifies not because of its vision of a new world but because of its understanding of the cruelty and mess we make of our personal relationships.”
“Whether imagining the future or the past, Hall’s evocation of place and atmosphere is a joy…an accomplished, provocative novel. The farm and its community are a triumph of the imagination: you could almost believe the author had lived among them as part of her research. This, combined with the luminosity of the prose casting its light across an emotional and intellectual landscape as bracing as the fells themselves places Daughters of the North at the vanguard of the new wave of futuristic dystopian literature.”
“Her work renders the darkest emotional landscapes with a sharp eye and a warm heart. Hall’s acidic poetry follows through in Daughters of the North.”
“This novel is well timed. Though the novel’s futurist vision is fascinating and disturbing, there’s a whiff of 1970s radical feminism about Sister and her comrades. Hall seems to suggest that if they succeeded in their revolution, they would be repressive in turn.”
ISBN: 9780061430367