They (Faber Editions)

As heard on BBC Radio 4‘s Front Row: the radical dystopian classic, lost for forty years: in a nightmarish Britain, THEY are coming closer. ‘A creepily prescient tale ... Insidiously horrifying!‘ Margaret Atwood ‘A masterpiece of creeping dread.‘ Emily St. John Mandel ‘As creepy, tense and strange as when I first read it 40 years ago.‘ Ian Rankin This is Britain: but not as we know it. THEY are coming closer . . . THEY begin with a dead dog, shadowy footsteps, confiscated books. Soon the National Gallery is purged; eerie towers survey the coast; savage mobs stalk the countryside destroying artworks - and those who resist. THEY capture dissidents - writers, painters, musicians, even the unmarried and childless - in military sweeps, ‘curing‘ these subversives of individual identity. Survivors gather together as cultural refugees, preserving their crafts, creating, loving and remembering. But THEY make it easier to forget ... Lost for over forty years, Kay Dick‘s They (1977) is a rediscovered dystopian masterpiece of art under attack: a cry from the soul against censorship, a radical celebration of non-conformity - and a warning.