Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
Set in 1971, this story of self-discovery, friendship and family is a life-affirming and upbeat read, with Emma Kennedy’s trademark warmth and humour shining through every chapter. Yes, tell us a little bit about Dreamland, your own recent book which features a near-future dystopia. I genuinely must say that large chunks of this brilliant book are five star but I struggled with other elements a lot! As a final question: do you think that people’s appetites for near-future dystopia books, or dystopic books in general, have changed over the pandemic period?
Dreamland by Rankin Gee Rosa - AbeBooks Dreamland by Rankin Gee Rosa - AbeBooks
What kept me going was Chance, the main character of the book. The book is filled with complicated, difficult to like people but Chance loves all of them in her own way. She has this desperate desire to trust and to help, even when it's clear that she shouldn't. Nobody thanks for it and it ends up hurting her in many different ways, each more heartbreaking than the last. But her perseverance and loving heart is properly inspiring. Dreamland offers a similarly bleak prognosis 100 years on, but while this wonderful novel might be a stark warning of what may be coming down the line for post-Brexit Britain, it also confirms that where humanity endures, its innate goodness will always prevail. How could it be any other way under those incredible Thanet skies? Manston Airport, which among other routes hosted a twice-daily KLM service to Amsterdam before decline set in, was bought for a pound in 2013 amid encouraging noises about investment and expansion before closing down, at the cost of 144 jobs. Most recently Manston has been an overflow lorry park mitigating Brexit-related delays at the Port of Dover.
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. On to Ethiopia which, with 12 large lakes and nine major rivers, is empowered by water. Its neighbours are reliant A beautiful book: thought-provoking, eerily prescient and very witty” Brit Bennett, author of The Vanishing Half I’m not an AI scientist, but it feels very convincing to me. The discussion takes the form of instant messaging, kind of like a Gchat transcript, between these two researchers. And it feels very human, very sure-footed the whole way through.
Rosa Rankin-Gee: Planet Thanet - Bookanista Rosa Rankin-Gee: Planet Thanet - Bookanista
We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview. This subplot underpins a wonderfully entertaining and lucid account, written with wit, pace and clarity. I looked out of the window and along the coast. There was this spreading out of light, all of it like fern unfolding in a nature documentary.”
Join: Albert Einstein & you
Climate change brings scorching summers and rising sea levels; there’s a great “washout” early in the book, a huge tide surging through the town causing devastating floods and drownings, something that becomes a more regular occurrence until townsfolk plan their day’s movements by the high tide times that make the streets impassable. Chance’s family is one of many offered a cash grant to move out of London - and so she, her mother Jas and brother JD relocate to the seaside, just as the country edges towards vertiginous change.
Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee - Signed Edition - Coles Books Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee - Signed Edition - Coles Books
The book is an insightful look into the way society views individuals and ranks them based on their financial value over a more humanist approach. The judgement placed on those in need, totally dismissing the impact of access to resources, as well as the ease with which people can turn on others to save themselves. This book is stunning. There is so much ugliness within the story, but it is told with such realism and such beauty it has touched me and I don't think I will ever forget it. Margate in particular has seen its fortunes become decidedly mixed in recent decades. By the 1980s the once thriving holiday destination saw its hotels and guesthouses being converted into cheap bedsits, where there was money to be made by landlords trousering government money to house the poor and vulnerable displaced from London and other parts of the south-east by a combination of austerity and the ever-rising cost of living. To go off on a slight tangent, the ending reminded me of a question I've been turning over since attending this excellent book festival event: how do you end a climate novel? The majority of novels about climate change I've read have not been Kim Stanley Robinson-style attempts to write a way out of the climate crisis; they have explored its specific emotional and/or social impacts either now or in the near future. Examples I've read recently include The Last Migration, The Sunlight Pilgrims, The Inland Sea, Weather, The Ice, Stillicide, Always North, and Gun Island. A novelist writing such a book is left with the difficult dilemma of how hopeful to make their ending, on both a character and setting level. In the examples listed, the ending is generally open and ambiguous on either or both levels, as indeed it is in 'Dreamland'. I think climate change poses a particular narrative problem, as it prevents life from just going on. If the characters survive until the end of the book, the reader cannot assume that they would continue to do so in a destablised world. 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.
Sign up to our newsletter
A newly reissued romantic comedy first published in 1978, we follow two couples – Guido, “serious in matters of the heart”, and “precise” Holly, Guido’s cheerful cousin Vincent and his spiky colleague Misty – as they meet, fall in love, then endeavour to remain “happy all the time” amid the challenges of life. The Final Revival Of Opal & Nev, by Dawnie Walton and our new Mirror Book Club book of the month - Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin (see below) 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. 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.
Dreamland | New Humanist Book review: Dreamland | New Humanist
Yes. I suppose that’s why the movie is necessarily a major departure from the book. The movie version is a thriller, with a plot to match. But those characters actually play only bit-parts in the original book. They feel like very separate cultural objects. The world is going to hell in a handbasket, politicians are corrupt, the rich get richer at the expense of the poor, and global warming is going to kill us all. A single mum, Jas is offered a cash grant to relocate to Margate with her son JD and daughter Chance. Without questioning why they are being paid to move, the family are delighted to leave the grim bedsits they’ve endured in London. In Margate, they find a flat and Jas gets a job at a pub, where seven-year-old Chance befriends Davey. They attend the Tracey Emin Academy, until the schools start closing. People are moving out of Thanet and dangerous tides and rising temperatures keep the tourists away. Increasingly feral, Chance and Davey run amok and hang out in Dreamland, the town’s derelict amusement park. Yes. There’s a slow decline in your book—economically, and the increasing shrugging off of responsibility by the government. Shall we talk about World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War? I think this introduces us to a different sort of near-future dystopia, something a little more fantastical, although it’s played completely straight. For me, they’ve held an appeal since I was a child. One of the books I’m going to talk about is Z for Zachariah; I remember it lighting a flame in me. Dystopias put you in a world where characters (and thus, in some way you, as a reader) have to fight to survive. It makes all those structures of society that make life sanitised and safe suddenly disappear, and I think that’s something that can be particularly appealing to young people—the idea of suddenly, drastically having agency.Franky’s arrival awakens something long lost, if it was ever present at all, in Chance, the sense that one person can unconditionally change your life and make it better in a way that a hundred broken-into homes cannot. This is a dystopian novel based on the rising sea levels and overpopulation with families being offered cash to leave their homes and move to the coasts, despite this being a death wish. 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. courtesy IMP Awards) Creative inspiration can come from all kinds of strange, beautiful and unexpected places – a waterfall at sunset, a colourfully-dressed woman on a train at peak hour or a snippet of history, long forgotten but dredged up to fill a social media post with a fascinating factoid. Continue Reading
Great Deal 
New Comment