The Carhullan Army

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Home to William Golding, Sylvia Plath, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Max Porter, Ingrid Persaud, Anna Burns and Rachel Cusk, among many others, Faber is proud to publish some of the greatest novelists from the early twentieth century to today. Davies is obsessed with, as shown in the Doctor Who episode ‘Turn Left’ and the two most recent Torchwood stories, Children of Earth and Miracle Day. It’s a bleak vision, and as is so often the case, women are impacted far more than the men by the Authority’s policies.

People were moved into cities, where they were assigned often-pointless jobs, and women were forced to get IUDs so they won’t get pregnant. The Carhullan Army, as the group is known, is led by Jackie (Jacks) Nixon who has few rules but who ensures that those rules are adhered to. There are walks from the doorstep, over High Street to Ullswater and across Bampton Common to Haweswater. Then I discovered that one her novels ‘The Electric Michelangelo’ was shortlisted for the Booker and so I went and got that too.Outside there is off-road parking for six cars, rear veranda with furniture and an enclosed gravelled garden with furniture. But this intimate concern with the physical is of a piece with the sensual collection of short stories Hall published in 2011, The Beautiful Indifference. There is an open-plan living room with a kitchen, dining area and sitting area with a woodburning stove, a utility and an additional sitting room with a woodburning stove. The fact that this is a community of women changes some of the power dynamics, but it doesn’t remove them.

A dark cloud hovers over the horizon and the women of Carhullan have to decide how to handle the threat. With much of the country now underwater, assets and weapons seized by the government - itself run by the sinister Authority - and war raging in South America and China, life in Britain is unrecognisable. A Handmaid's Tale for our times, this exhilarating novel pits political oppression against the will to survive, in a nightmarishly believable vision of Britain in the near future.

All three that I’ve read are very different from each other, and from this one, but all feature excellent writing. The conceit of the book is that it is a found text, which allows the author to pretend that parts of it have been lost, I think if I had been her editor, I would have pushed her to make the text more fragmentary than it is, suffice it to say this makes the narrative jump in places, some readers looking at other reviews didn't like it, I thought it passing clever to avoid having to spell out everything that happened and I've got enough grey hairs that I don't feel the need to read every detail anymore - you can kill a story too by over telling it.

Suffocated and stifled by the authoritarian regime, alienated from her husband and violated by her coil, Sister resolves to escape this wasted life. The implication is that the Authority has fallen, and this document has been found in the ruins, so it's a history, in a sense. It’s a novel that provoked a wide range of responses, and it’s worth going and reading some of the reviews that Niall Harrison lists here, as well as Nick Hubble’s excellent piece from Vector 258. She emerges from a brutal spell in solitary confinement to find a kind of Eden – women working together to carve a rugged life out of the harsh surroundings. Built in 1504 by Prior Thomas Docwra, St John’s Gate was the south gateway to the Priory of Clerkenwell, the headquarters of the Knights of St John of Jerusalem.In this story remoteness is resistance, and there is a sense of Cumbria as it's own place before there was an England or a Scotland. Farmhouse, late C17, extended in 1729; L-shaped barn range, probably C18, incorporating earlier features. loads of character, beautiful location, great hot tub, perfect set up for several generations of a family with little children and 2 dogs. Considering the recent spate of unseasonable weather and car bombs, Sarah Hall's third novel can't help but have a certain resonance. The narrator sees herself in the mirror towards the close of the book - and she no longer recognises herself, her nature has been nurtured through tough mothering into something foreign to her, she has become her own anima.