Listen

The death of a childhood friend leads a woman journalist to a US military surveillance base on a bleak Yorkshire moor, in this taut political thriller. Set in 1996, when US mass intercept surveillance in the UK was already fast expanding, Listen pits the macho and paranoid world of secret military intelligence against the women activists intent on protesting against the US presence. The personal journey of the chief protagonist, unusually an older woman, draws together a web of relationships between four very different women and the male National Security Officers responsible for controlling protesters. Based on a factual background, Listen anticipates the contemporary issue of mass state intercept surveillance exposed by Edward Snowden, and underlines how this activity has been expanding covertly in the UK for decades. Sarah Braithwaite’s BBC radio documentaries once won prizes, but she’s long since been sidelined. Only one day after Sarah’s fiftieth birthday, and her new young female boss threatens to bin her safe but uninspiring job editing short stories. It’s all change at the BBC. When an elderly woman submits an Orwellian story about an expanding US military base which, the woman claims, is illegally intercepting UK telecommunications traffic, Sarah rejects her as paranoid. The woman, undeterred, continues to harass her, pleading for help for “a girl in danger” but Sarah - her own London life in free-fall - refuses to listen. Unexpected news of the death of her childhood friend, Lucy Jepson, prompts Sarah to escape back to her northern roots where she learns that Lucy, flamboyant heiress to an industrial fortune, has died, poor and alone, on a derelict smallholding. Shocked by the circumstances surrounding Lucy’s death, and driven as much by instinct as logic, Sarah determines to find out how she came to die. Her turbulent journey takes her through suburban and rural North Yorkshire, the evidence leading her ever closer to the sinister American base, RAF Menwin Moor; the same base that Erin, the woman she had so carelessly dismissed, had repeatedly tried to bring to her attention. Who is the “girl in danger”? If Sarah is to resolve her own life she must find out how her friend died and try to save the girl. And to do that she must penetrate the male bastion of the base at its most vulnerable point. Clare Taylor has written short stories, features, drama documentaries and comedies, including a six-part comedy for Channel 4 and a short film, “Away From it All”, narrated by John Cleese, which went out on general release with Monty Python’s “Life of Brian.” She wrote Listen after graduating with Distinction from an MA in Fiction.