Gather the Daughters

Shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2018

A frighteningly believable dystopian vision, Jennie Melamed’s debut imagines a world where resources are scarce, lives short and women’s fertility a valuable commodity.

She can’t see the point of the repetitiveness of it all, people living to create more people and then dying when they’re useless, to make room for even more people

On a small isolated island, there's a community that lives by its own rules. Boys grow up knowing they will one day take charge, while girls know they will be married and pregnant within moments of hitting womanhood.

But before that time comes, a ritual offers children an exhilarating reprieve. Every summer they are turned out onto their doorsteps, to roam the island, sleep on the beach and build camps in trees. To be free.

At the end of one of such summer, one of the younger girls sees something she was never supposed to see. And she returns home with a truth that could bring their island world to its knees.

Echoing the hauntingly entrancing quality of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Gather the Daughters spins a tail of women’s lives and bodies subsumed by a repressive, abusive social order. Intertwining the perspectives of four teenage girls on the brink of entering the frightening world of adulthood, the novel weaves a story of defiance and indomitable spirit which feels perfectly primed for our time.

• Publisher: Headline Publishing Group
• ISBN: 9781472241726
• Number of pages: 448
• Weight: 309g
• Dimensions: 196 x 126 x 30 mm