Outcast

"Darkly imaginative, thoroughly chilling and entertaining from beginning to end" Bob Milne (Beauty In Ruins)

"A frightening and realistically possible future scenario" Johann David Renner.

All Layla wanted was to fit in and be happy...

A utilitarian world where people are created by genetic engineering companies and programmed for roles in life.
Love is forbidden. People are robots, meant to devote their lives to the twin pillars of work and consumption. To fail to assume the role you’ve been created for is to become a Stray and be treated worse than a criminal.
Which is what happens to Layla Thomas when she becomes violently ill and flees from her sister’s upmarket salon on her first day of work as a BDSM mistress-slave.
She soon discovers she’s been given aversion therapy and addicted to the potentially lethal drug, Klava. Behind her predicament is Peta, the chameleon-like hermaphrodite with whom she has been having a clandestine affaire.
Denied treatment for her Klava addiction and thrown out of society, Layla has no choice but to join Peta’s band of underground Strays who are fighting to overturn the status quo.
But all Layla wants is to return to her rightful role. A battle of wills begins with Peta using every means to crack Layla’s programming.
But is Peta really who and what s/he seems? What is the terrible secret behind this utopian society’s facade?

Outcast follows Layla’s perilous voyage through a world where the cold hand of economic rationalism has reduced humanity to a distant memory. But can humanity be that easily beaten?