Daughters of the North
By Sarah Hall
(Harper Perennial, Paperback, 9780061430367, 240pp.)
Publication Date: April 2008
Categories: Literary
 |     |
In her stunning novel, Hall imagines a new dystopia set in the not-too-distant future. England is in a state of environmental crisis and economic collapse. There has been a census, and all citizens have been herded into urban centers. Reproduction has become a lottery, with contraceptive coils fitted to every female of childbearing age. A girl who will become known only as "Sister" escapes the confines of her repressive marriage to find an isolated group of women living as "un-officials" in Carhullan, a remote northern farm, where she must find out whether she has it in herself to become a rebel fighter. Provocative and timely, Daughters of the North poses questions about the lengths women will go to resist their oppressors, and under what circumstances might an ordinary person become a terrorist.
Sarah Hall was born in Cumbria, England. Her fiction has won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Overall Winner, Best First Book), a Society of Authors Betty Trask Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the James Tiptree, Jr., Literary Award, and the Portico Prize. She has been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (South Asian and Europe region), the Prix Femina-Roman Etranger, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award.
“If you liked Children of Men, give this sci-fi page-turner a read. Sister exists in a dystopian future where the UK is under a totalitarian regime.”
-OK! Magazine (FIVE STARS)
“A ferocious dystopian novel…Hall’s dystopian story of resistance and struggle…must be read at the same time as a kind of optimism, striking in its final pages a defiant chord that reminds us power can sometimes be defeated, if not always, and if always at great cost.”
-Independent Weekly (Durham, NC)
 |
Flight Behavior Barbara Kingsolver Harper |
 |
The Art Forger Barbara Shapiro Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill |
 |
Sweeth Tooth Ian McEwan Nan A. Talese |
 |
The Light Between Oceans ML Steadman Scribner |
