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

Product Information

About the Author: Rosa Rankin-Gee lives between Ramsgate and South London. Her first novel The Last Kings of Sark won Shakespeare & Company’s Paris Literary Prize. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, Vogue, the Paris Review, and Esquire, among others. I can’t stress enough how much I loved this book. The story was incredibly gripping, there wasn’t a dull moment, it drew me in right at the start. I loved all the characters, flaws and all, it made them feel so real, like they were people you knew or had met before somehow. 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? is touted as the deadline for the world to go carbon neutral and preserve natural habitats. How optimistic are you that we’ll make it?

Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee - Signed Edition - Coles Books Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee - Signed Edition - Coles Books

This parallel universe is peopled by demons, old gods, talking ravens and a shapeshifter, all searching for a scroll box called The Firestarter. 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 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. The region has been frequently ill-served by its politicians too. In the early 1980s a Tory councillor got six years for fraud and forgery. Jonathan Aitken was the MP for South Thanet when he was convicted and imprisoned for perjury. A decade ago a former Conservative leader of the council went to prison for property-related misdemeanours carried out during his time in office.If you have been paying attention to the world of late, wrapped up rather despairingly as it is in pandemic, war, climate change and creeping intolerance and extremism, it will not surprise you that hope is in short supply for many people. The narration is extraordinarily well done. Many post-apocalyptic books have a spareness and sparseness that can sometimes feel affected. This feels incredibly naturalistic, and yet manages to be very lyrical. One review I read talked about it having a haiku-like quality. It has these clipped sentences, in a way that feels hyper-realistic to how minds think. It’s effortlessly beautiful while being violent and harrowing. Set in what could be a future not so far in the future,it starts with a struggling mother and her two kids relocating to Margate.

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

Dreamland is a harrowing look into what happens when your country gives up on you and removes its responsibility for citizens as a whole. London is aptly described as a "fourth world country" by the protagonist. The story begins when Chance and her family receive a monetary incentive to move out of London to the deprived seaside town of Margate. New laws slowly come into place including Localisation, which is the total divestment of control to local councils. The result - abject poverty.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.