Red clocks

SHORTLISTED FOR THE INAUGURAL ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION ‘Intense, beautifully crafted . . . Her talent is electric. Get ready for a shock’ Guardian This is a work of fiction.

Keep telling yourself that. America has changed. For women, it has changed for the worse. Ro, a single high-school teacher, is desperate to become a mother.

But with IVF now illegal – along with abortion and other reproductive rights – parenthood looks increasingly unlikely for her.

Her best friend Susan is trapped in a failing marriage with two children, her star student Mattie is unwillingly pregnant and Gin, an outcast offering other women natural remedies, has become the centre of a modern-day witch-hunt. With warmth, wit and ferocious inventiveness, Red Clocks shows us an all-too plausible near-future: like The Handmaid’s Tale, it is a call to arms, set to become a modern classic.