Description

For fans of I Who Have Never Known Men, a ‘creepily prescient’ (Margaret Atwood) lost dystopian ‘masterpiece’ (Emily St. John Mandel): in a nightmarish Britain, THEY are coming closer.

‘Ceepy, tense and strange.’ Ian Rankin ‘Delicious and sexy and downright chilling … Read it!’ Rumaan Alam ‘The signature of an enchantress.’ Edna O’Brien ‘I’m pretty wild about this paranoid, terrifying 1977 masterpiece.’ Lauren Groff ‘Completely got under my skin.’ Kiran Millwood Hargrave ‘Lush, hypnotic, compulsive.’ Eimear McBride ‘A masterwork of English pastoral horror.’ Claire-Louise Bennett ‘A short shocker.’ Andrew Hunter Murray

This is Britain: but not as we know it.
THEY begin with a dead dog, shadowy footsteps, confiscated books. Soon the National Gallery is purged; eerie towers survey the coast; mobs stalk the countryside destroying artworks – and those who resist.
THEY capture dissidents – writers, painters, musicians, even the unmarried and childless – in military sweeps, ‘curing’ these subversives of individual identity.
Survivors gather together as cultural refugees, preserving their crafts, creating, loving and remembering. But THEY make it easier to forget …

Lost for half a century, newly introduced by Carmen Maria Machado, Kay Dick’s They (1977) is a rediscovered dystopian masterpiece of art under attack: a cry from the soul against censorship, a radical celebration of non-conformity – and a warning.