Search results for ""Author Rosa Rankin-Gee""

For fans of Children of Men, Years and Years & Station Eleven, a postcard from a future Britain that’s closer than we think.An Evening Standard 'Best New Book' ‘A beautiful book: thought-provoking, eerily prescient and very witty.’ Brit Bennett, author of The Vanishing Half 'Water courses through its pages, as rising sea levels heighten inequalities, buoy populist politicians and wash away every certainty of civilisation. But there’s also the novel’s prose – its liquid grace and glinting sparkle – and the sheer irresistibility of a narrative that sweeps along with a force that feels tidal in its pull.' The Observer ''You said that you would come back. You looked me in the eye and said that. Well, if you had, this is what you would have seen: soft wood, black cracks, fridges in the road. The broken spines of old rides at Dreamland.' 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 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. 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. Set in a future unsettlingly close to home, against a backdrop of soaring inequality and creeping political extremism, Rankin-Gee demonstrates, with cinematic pace and deep humanity, the enduring power of love and hope in a world spinning out of control. 'She vividly captures the balance between ferocity and vulnerability as the two girls explore their burgeoning desire; one minute they’re greedy for each other, the next they’re proceeding more gingerly. Theirs is a great first love, blazing bright and furious amid the poverty and the pain, the perfect counterweight that’s needed to make the novel sing. Dreamland brings us face-to-face with much of what we’re on the threshold of losing; nevertheless, it manages to convince us that its characters have everything still to live for.' Guardian 'A great coming-of-age story, and a warning.' Evening Standard ‘This brutal read has moments of hope and love but also serves as a hideous warning to fight for what’s right’ Daily Mail ‘Brilliantly bleak… this compelling novel is horribly plausible, chilling and feels like a warning that’s come too late.’ Daily Mirror 'Chance’s life is filled with poverty, crime, drugs and fear – until she meets Franky, a girl unlike anyone else she knows. Their relationship brings light and love...' Daily Express 'Rankin-Gee’s novel is a triumph, being as much a love letter to the heady ups and crashing lows of youthful entanglements as it is a paean to the former grandeur of its stark coastal setting. Read this now.' GQ 'A writer of a new time… A writer we will all want to read again and again.' Monique Roffey, author of the Costa Book of The Year The Mermaid of Black Conch “Dazzling and shattering" Nell Dunn, author of Up The Junction and Talking to Women 'The writing clings like sand. Unexpected turns of phrase have burrowed deep into the recesses of my brain. She has created a vivid, textural portrait, teeming with life and granular, sensory detail as well as wisdom. It does what the most haunting of apocalyptic novels do, which is to shine a light on what is already happening around us and ask that we wake up.' Olivia Sudjic, author of Asylum Road ‘Entrancing… A dark and devastating funhouse ride through curtailed innocence and apocalyptic experience. And- most uniquely- a love letter to the waning magic and melancholy of British seaside towns. It is its own twist on the lucid dystopias of Diane Cook, Kirsten Roupenian and Emily St John Mandel. The book is also deeply cinematic- I was reminded, throughout, of Terry Gilliam's waterlogged neo-noir fantasy Tideland, as well as the dreamy realism of the films of Andrea Arnold and Lynne Ramsay.' Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti 'Rankin-Gee is a visionary empath. Every page of this book both broke my heart and made me laugh out loud. What a feat!' Jac Jemc, author of The Grip of It and False Bingo

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From the author of Dreamland 'My name is Jude. And because of Law, Hey and the Obscure, they thought I was a boy.'Jude is twenty-one when she flies in a private plane to Sark, a tiny carless Channel Island, the last place in Europe to abolish feudalism. She has been hired for the summer to give tuition to a rich local boy called Pip. But when she arrives, the family is unsettling- Pip is awkward, over-literal, and adamant he doesn't need a tutor, and upstairs, his enigmatic mother Esmé casts a shadow over the house.Enter Sofi: the family's holiday cook, a magnetic, mercurial Polish girl with appalling kitchen hygiene, who sings to herself and sleeps naked. When the father of the family goes away on business, Pip's science lessons are replaced by midday rosé and scallop-smuggling, and summer begins. Soon something surprising starts to touch the three together.But those strange, golden weeks cannot last forever. Later, in Paris, Normandy and London, they find themselves looking for the moment that changed everything.Compelling, dark and funny, The Last Kings of Sark is tale of complicated love, only children and missed opportunities, from one of our most exciting young writers.

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The whimsical debut picture book by two celebrated novelists about a slug, desperate to fit in at all costs, and the adventure he embarks upon to learn that maybe being yourself is best of all! Serge was a snail without a shell. His mum and his dad were shell-less as well. "You?re no more than a SLUG!" the snails at school taunted. I wish I had a shell. It was all that Serge wanted. Serge is not like the snails at school. They call him a horrible name--slug--and even though that's entirely what he is, he wishes for a shell of his own. Feeling like an outcast, Serge sets off on a solo adventure in search of the elusive shell that will make a perfect home--and make him just like everybody else. After some much-needed advice from his friend Fish, he finds himself at the ocean, where many options await: "Big shells and teeny shells/ All the in-betweeny shells/ Pyramid and swirly shells/Altogether curly shells!" But can Serge find the perfect shell, or is he destined to be different forever? A charming, lyrical story with bouncy text, whimsically illustrated by artist Andrea Blinick, Serge the Snail Without A Shell puts a modern twist on a tale as old as time: trying to fit in at all costs, before realizing that maybe being yourself is best of all.

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