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

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The storyline was unpredictable in a fantastic way. There were quite a few developments that I didn't see coming but most don't hit as big twist moments, instead you're subtly given information that allows you to build your own picture.

Rosa Rankin-Gee

Dreamland’s main problem is tangential to this, and more specifically to do with its use of speculative materials. Rankin-Gee’s novel is no cosy catastrophe, and its focus on communities, on the fraying social fabric of a divided nation, is to be commended. However, as a regular reader of science fiction I feel like I’ve read literally dozens of novels like this, stories that follow the same basic trajectory: things were kind of OK for us, then they got worse, then some unprecedented event from outside (asteroid strike, Kraken, zombie war, megatsunami, whatever) made things so much worse. And they kept on getting worse until we died or were saved. And yet in Rosa Rankin-Gee’s superbly gripping and deeply, emotionally resonant novel, Dreamland, where all of these disturbing trends have reached a nightmarishly definitive crescendo, when hope and the capacity for fierce unconditional love should have reached an irretrievable nadir, the ability to believe in better things to come is somehow still alive, and if not well, at least present and accounted for. With writing that is always entrancing and lyrically rich, Dreamland evokes how powerful hope can be.He got away with everything,” says Caleb, probably the closest Chance will have to a father figure. “All this call-me-by-my-first-name, I’ll-drink-a-pint-with-you bulls**t.” It is the twin sustainers of love and hope that help Chance to weather grief, disappointment and what effectively amounts to governmental genocide of its poorer citizens, and which given Dreamland such a rich, living quality, a tangible, palpable reminder that the human spirit can rise to immense challenges if given even half a chance.

Dreamland | New Humanist Book review: Dreamland | New Humanist

As I was saying before, dialogue is really hard to do. And this has perhaps sixty different voices. It’s polyphonic. Max Brooks is able to inhabit all these different characters. It’s an astounding piece of work. I feel quite evangelical about it. It’s a contemporary novel, about a gay man and gay woman who fall in love, but it’s also – in a prequel-esque way – within the Dreamland universe. I’m having a lot of fun with it. That’s part of why I wrote a semi-dystopian novel in any case, and that’s why they are some of the books that I love and recommend most. The premise of Station Eleven, for those who haven’t read it, is that a travelling symphony is moving on a circuit through an obliterated North America, performing the works of Shakespeare. I saw Emily St John Mandel speaking about this book at Shakespeare & Company just after it came out in 2014, and she said that in initial versions of the book, she also wanted them to be performing sitcom scripts, like an episode of Friends or How I Met Your Mother, so it would be like a palimpsest archive of culture from Shakespeare to modern times. I think she made the right decision, but I think it’s a funny bit of metadata about this book. The narrative proper begins a decade earlier, when Chance is seven years old. She is living in temporary accommodation in London with her mother Jas, and her older half-brother JD, who has ADHD. Jas is at the end of her tether. After being pushed from one unsuitable B&B to another, she takes advantage of a scheme organised by an up-and-coming politician, Rex Winstable, offering cash to families willing to move out of London and relocate to coastal towns in the southeast of England. Jas insists this will be a new start for all of them, a “clean slate.” But on arrival in Margate, it is clear that those with money and somewhere else to go have already moved out, leaving the town increasingly impoverished, and without the wherewithal to combat the changes that are on their way.Things can be rubbish, but then you see a sky like that and it’s like – I have that. That’s mine,” says Chance of a Margate sunset. “Which is why I wanna look in that direction. Not behind me.” From the Booker shortlisted author of The Mars Room comes this collection of essays and articles gathered together from the last two decades. The long time span doesn’t reduce the freshness of Kushner’s prose as she takes on topics ranging from a visit to a Palestinian refugee camp to her love of classic cars. When her emotionally distant husband refuses point blank, Florence sets off on a solo road trip instead.