A strange, quiet book, where the speculative elements are painted so lightly, you won’t realise you’re reading sci fi until you’ve been sucked into a story about love, family and community in a forgotten West Country village.
Jem runs a small rural Inn, serving brew to a smattering of locals alongside her immigrant partner, Isely; a love affair that seems both intensely intimate and frustratingly unconsummated. The community where they live, forms part of The Protectorate, a partitioned area of the UK that separated itself from the outside world in protest over the invasion of Qita, Isley’s home planet. The battle for Qita ended before it begun, won by humanity without a shot fired, a fact explained away by the pacifist nature of Qita’s people.
Jem lives a carefully compact existence; innkeeper, resentful sister to the local councillor, and estranged mother to a wayward son, until outsiders arrive to penetrate the studied calm.
The guide laughed at him. ‘Somebody told me that [Where to babies come from?] was the most difficult question you can human. Is that true? I heard you squeeze them out of yourselves, and cut them free. They do not decide to come free themselves!’
The book holds its cards close to its chest and although I was sucked in from the beginning, it wasn’t until the final quarter that I really sat up and realised I was reading something important. Expertly woven into a story about intimacy and independence, selfhood and community, are deeper questions about how and why we reach for each other, and what we might be prepared to sacrifice not to feel alone.
The novel was a finalist for the 2021 BSFA Award for Best Novel and Arthur C. Clarke Award, as well as being named one of the five best science fiction novels of the year by the Financial Times. It has been monikered a ‘modern classic’, something which gets bandied around a lot, but that I think in this case is valid. This book is grappling with something timeless and vital, and doing it in a perfectly paced and plotted story that I believe will hold out against the test of time.
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Buy on kindle £5.99
Paperback from Awesome Books £6.05
Follow the author @AliyaWhiteley
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