Dreamland: An Evening Standard 'Best New Book' of 2021

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Mirror Book Club members have chosen a brand-new book of the month – Happy All The Time by Laurie Colwin. You said earlier that it’s quite similar to How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff, which you considered including in your list of five. There were so many edges, edges everywhere. It’s just you never know where exactly the edge is until you tip over it.” (P. 46)

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

The band’s compelling story is told by a multitude of voices interviewed by journalist S Sunny Shelton. Her father Jimmy was a drummer for the band and murdered at the showcase – and she is determined to find out exactly happened. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it, it’s changed the way I view the world and consider current events.This parallel universe is peopled by demons, old gods, talking ravens and a shapeshifter, all searching for a scroll box called The Firestarter. The premise of the novel is that an agent of the United Nations Postwar Commission is compiling first person accounts—ten years after the event—of what was effectively another pandemic, a zombie pandemic that turned into a worldwide zombie war. The realism is extraordinary; it’s a wild feat of imagination. In all the other books I’ve recommended, you get a first-person narrator, or a defined cast of characters. The world-building in those books is already extremely impressive. But what’s so exceptional about World War Z is that it’s so incredibly diverse. The agent moves around the world, from China to Israel, speaking to characters of different countries from different social positions. Its geopolitics feels very accurate, and he imagines them with such complexity and density. It’s staggeringly well done. In the coastal resort of Margate, hotels lie empty and sun-faded ‘For Sale’ signs line the streets. The sea is higher – it’s higher everywhere – and those who can are moving inland. A young girl called Chance, however, is just arriving. Chance’s life is filled with poverty, crime, drugs and fear – until she meets Franky, a girl unlike anyone else she knows. 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.

Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee | Goodreads Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee | Goodreads

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. courtesy Allen & Unwin Book Publishers) We live in a grievously unbalanced world. No surprises there you say; one look at the 24/7 news cycle or at the place we work or the society in which we live and it becomes clear that fairness very rarely rules the day and Continue Reading Rosa Rankin-Gee’s novel is very much about this – about poor families given “grants” to move out of London in a not-too-distant future where the temperature and sea levels have ri 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. It’s set in Margate in the near future. In the coastal resort of Margate, hotels lie empty and sun-faded ‘For Sale’ signs line the streets. The sea is higher – it’s higher everywhere – and those who can are moving inland. A young girl called Chance, however, is just arriving.

The storyline was unpredictable in a fantastic way. There were quite a few developments that I didn't see coming but most don't hit as big twist moments, instead you're subtly given information that allows you to build your own picture.

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

For fans of Children of Men, Years and Years & Station Eleven, a postcard from a future Britain that’s closer than we think. We are simultaneously experiencing a housing crisis and a climate crisis. In this country, they haven’t come close to peaking – or clashing together – in full force yet, but they will, and it will be devastating.” The Australians also face the challenge of climate change and the risk of large-scale population shifts. Marshall explores the fascinating possibility of governments being forced to build new major cities on more hospitable territory. In their new home, they find space and wide skies, a world away from the cramped bedsits they've lived in up until now. But challenges swiftly mount. JD's business partner, Kole, has a violent, charismatic energy that whirlpools around him and threatens to draw in the whole family. And when Chance comes across Franky, a girl her age she has never seen before - well-spoken and wearing sunscreen - something catches in the air between them. Their fates are bound: a connection that is immediate, unshakeable, and, in a time when social divides have never cut sharper, dangerous.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. This book definitely earns the title of a rollercoaster and not even a rusted one from Dreamland. My heart was broken by multiple characters, multiple times, and Rankin-Gee’s characters all have intricate layers that lay under their initially tough exteriors. Chance, our protagonist, goes through such a journey and it’s both full of hope and filled with despair. She is such a complex character, who has to adapt so much.

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

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. This was a perfect book for me and I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys work from similar authors like Margaret Atwood. It's clear that a lot of love and research went into this book, and the imagined UK and worldwide government response to rising sea levels was both tragic and very believable. It’s a reflection on where society is heading post covid as the impact of climate change becomes more apparent over time, divisions in society greater as the far right is able to grab more power over a sustained period of time, seeking a solution to over population and economic failures.In Chance, the novel’s protagonist, Rankin-Gee has created one of those characters that stays with the reader long after finishing the book. Part Little Nell from The Old Curiosity Shop, part Turtle from Gabriel Tallent’s My Absolute Darling, Chance is named with irony as hers is a life all-but devoid of opportunity.