Daughters of the North - by Sarah Hall (Paperback)

About the Book

In this dark fable set in the near future, life in Britain in unrecognizable. Much of the country is now underwater, and assets have been seized by the sinister Authority that runs the government. Hall's innovative work is a testament to the triumph of the individual in dire circumstances.

Book Synopsis

From Booker and Orange Prize-nominated author Sarah Hall comes the tale of an imaginary England, a future dystopian society where the right to bear a child is determined by a state lottery system.

In this stunning novel Sarah Hall draws on the work of Margaret Atwood and George Orwell to imagine a dystopic England where terrifying new systems of control are in place and reproduction has become a lottery. When a girl known only as "Sister" escapes the confines of her increasingly repressive marriage to find an isolated group of women living on a remote northern farm, she must find out whether she has it in herself to become an active insurgent.

This fascinating novel considers what lengths women will go to in a brutalized world in order to resist their oppressors, what tactics they must employ to survive and remain free. But the story asks a wider and more difficult question: under what circumstances might an ordinary person become a terrorist?

From the Back Cover

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.

Review Quotes

"Hall's novel is to be admired for its own slow grace." -- New York Times Book Review

"A complex, tight work about hope springing out of resistance." -- NPR

"[A]mazing work. A terrific and original novel by a splendid new writer." -- Washington Post

"With echoes of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and P. D. James's The Children of Men, Hall's dystopian landscape is far too close for comfort, the confession form giving her prose an economy and urgency...The novel is, among other things, a meditation on the inequality and difference of gender." -- The Times (London)

"Reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's dystopian fable The Handmaid's Tale, Hall's third novel portrays an equally bleak future. Set in a flood-ravaged England, where food is in scant supply and reproduction is controlled by a dictatorship, one woman attempts to escape to a self-sufficient commune in Cumbria. But utopias have a habit of disintegrating, and she soon finds herself engaged in a very real battle against a repressive regime." -- Marie Claire (UK)

"Hall's sharp and vivid evocation of landscape has the value of rooting her dark fantasy in a recognizable rural world ... Although its narrative voice and political vision may be too bleak for many readers, the seriousness of Hall's intent and the scale of her achievement are to be highly commended." -- Daily Telegraph (London)

"A community under threat was also the theme of Hall's first novel Haweswater and she is an impressive writer on all the alliances, compromises and tensions of group living ... This is a violent novel, strange and unsettling. It terrifies not because of its vision of a new world but because of its understanding of the cruelty and mess we make of our personal relationships." -- The Tablet, "Novel of the Week"

"Whether imagining the future or the past, Hall's evocation of place and atmosphere is a joy...an accomplished, provocative novel. The farm and its community are a triumph of the imagination: you could almost believe the author had lived among them as part of her research. This, combined with the luminosity of the prose casting its light across an emotional and intellectual landscape as bracing as the fells themselves places Daughters of the North at the vanguard of the new wave of futuristic dystopian literature." -- Literary Review

"Her work renders the darkest emotional landscapes with a sharp eye and a warm heart. Hall's acidic poetry follows through in Daughters of the North." -- Time Out London

"This novel is well timed. Though the novel's futurist vision is fascinating and disturbing, there's a whiff of 1970s radical feminism about Sister and her comrades. Hall seems to suggest that if they succeeded in their revolution, they would be repressive in turn." -- Daily Mail (London)

"Sarah Hall's third novel is an unexpected addition to that low-key sub-genre of science fiction. ... Hall makes her survivalist women properly foulmouthed and uncouth. Jackie Nixon herself is a splendid creation, ablaze with the schizoid, lacerating intelligence of a guerrilla messiah, or warrior queen. What she [Hall] has given us is good...tough, thorny, bloodyminded." -- The Guardian

"A serious political novel that convincingly explores the mindset of fanaticism. It anatomizes gender with precision, suggesting that notions of women as a softer sex are ingrained nonsense. Furthermore, Hall writes about the land with supple beauty, layering her words into a thick impasto that evokes the ridges and moorland she describes." -- The Sunday Telegraph

"Unsettling . . . what is new here...is the unflinching focus on physical control. This can make for squeamish reading...but the result is a powerful argument that, when civil institutions, or the bodies of state, are compromised, so, too, is the integrity of the body." -- The New Yorker

"The heroine of Sarah Hall's novel Daughters of the North is known only as Sister. She, like Hall's prose, is raw, brave, and suprising, both to herself and to the reader...The book is remarkable for its lovingly accurate portrayal of women...and although the story takes place in some dystopian future, the themes it raises are powerful in the present." -- Boston Phoenix

"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)