When She Woke
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- 8,49 €
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- 8,49 €
Description de l’éditeur
Hannah Payne is a RED.
Her crime: MURDER.
And her victim, says the state of Texas, was her unborn child.
Lying on a table in a bare room, covered by only a paper gown, Hannah awakens to a nightmare. Cameras broadcast her every move to millions at home, for whom observing new Chromes – criminals whose skin has been genetically altered to match the class of their crime – is a sinister form of entertainment.
Hannah refuses to reveal the identity of her father. But cast back into a world that has marked her for life, how far will she go to protect the man she loves?
An enthralling and chilling novel from the author of MUDBOUND, for fans of THE HANDMAID’S TALE and THE SCARLET LETTER.
Reviews
‘Hillary Jordan channels Nathaniel Hawthorne by way of Margaret Atwood in this fast-paced, dystopian thriller. Unputdownable’
Valerie Martin, author of The Confessions of Edward Day
‘Not only one of the best books of the year, but it's everything the dystopian genre was made for . . . An instant classic for the 21st century’
Publisher’s Weekly
‘Holds its own alongside the dark intentions of Margaret Atwood and Ray Bradbury’ NEW YORK TIMES
‘A stunning futuristic thriller … the setup in the first part of the book is excellent, very Handmaid’s Tale, the second half is a straight chase and escape tale. The whole thing is stunning.’
The Bookseller
PRAISE FOR HILLARY JORDAN:
‘Hillary Jordan writes with the force of a Delta storm’
Barbara Kingsolver
‘Jordan's tautly structured debut . . . confronts disturbing truths about America's past with a directness and a freshness of approach that recalls Alice Walker's The Color Purple.’
The Times
‘The winner of Barbara Kingsolver's Bellwether Prize for a novel 'promoting social responsibility,' Hillary Jordan is happily a writer who puts her duty to entertain first’
The Independent
About the author
Hillary Jordan spent fifteen years working as an advertising copywriter before starting to write fiction. Her first novel, MUDBOUND, was named one of the Top Ten Debut Novels of the Decade by Paste Magazine. It won the 2006 Bellwether Prize, founded by Barbara Kingsolver and awarded biennially to an unpublished debut novel that addresses issues of social justice. Hillary grew up in Dallas, Texas and Muskogee, Oklahoma. She lives in Brooklyn.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Though she was raised a good Christian, Hannah Payne often asks uncomfortable questions in Jordan's second novel (after Mudbound), such as "Why does God let innocent people suffer?" But questioning authority and breaking Texas law are two different things. Involved with her pastor, Hannah finds herself pregnant; to have the baby would mean publicly naming the father, so Hannah has an abortion. But in this alternate America, three years after the "Great Scourge" turned many women sterile, abortion is illegal, and Hannah is arrested. Her sentence: to live for several years as a "chrome," injected with a virus that turns her skin bright red. Her father finds her refuge in a halfway house for nonviolent chromes of all hues, but Hannah rebels against the abuse she receives in their "enlightenment sessions" and flees into the arms of an underground feminist group whose brutal pragmatism frightens her. But as she falls victim to betrayal after betrayal, Hannah's occasionally jarring na vet begins to break down. Comparisons to The Handmaid's Tale are inevitable; Jordan extrapolates misogynist fundamentalism to a logical endpoint, but she does little else. Characters are political archetypes, the narrative wanders, and even Hannah's transformation from dutiful daughter to take-charge fugitive feels false.
