Dreamland: An Evening Standard 'Best New Book' of 2021

Product Information

A “goofy white boy” with song-writing chops, he heads to America, sees Opal perform in a nightclub, and persuades her to work with him. The duo make a record which achieves cult status. According to your research, how far into the future is the Kent coast predicted to be flooded to the extent depicted in Dreamland ? In their new home, they find space and wide skies, a world away from the cramped bedsits they've lived in up until now. But challenges swiftly mount. JD's business partner, Kole, has a violent, charismatic energy that whirlpools around him and threatens to draw in the whole family. And when Chance comes across Franky, a girl her age she has never seen before - well-spoken and wearing sunscreen - something catches in the air between them. Their fates are bound: a connection that is immediate, unshakeable, and, in a time when social divides have never cut sharper, dangerous. The book is an insightful look into the way society views individuals and ranks them based on their financial value over a more humanist approach. The judgement placed on those in need, totally dismissing the impact of access to resources, as well as the ease with which people can turn on others to save themselves. Chance’s family is one of many offered a cash grant to move out of London - and so she, her mother Jas and brother JD relocate to the seaside, just as the country edges towards vertiginous change.

Book review: Dreamland | New Humanist Book review: Dreamland | New Humanist

Additionally, growing up in a coastal town that has never recovered from the impact of international holidays, combined with working in London today, I'd say the book is extremely accurate for the disparity between the capital and the coastal towns experiences. The book is accessible and opens discussions on a very real issue today, where citizens are being encouraged out of London into these commuter towns which don't receive anywhere near as much support. Perhaps appropriately, Dreamland is published exactly a century after T.S. Eliot sat in a seaside shelter close to Margate railway station and wrote part of The Waste Land: “On Margate Sands/ I can connect /Nothing with nothing./ The broken fingernails of dirty hands./ My people humble people who expect/ Nothing”. All Chance, her elder brother to another father J.D. and her younger brother Blue have is sheer grit and determination, driven by a ceaseless need to survive, an impulse which not always rewarded and which comes up emptyhanded. He got away with everything,” says Caleb, probably the closest Chance will have to a father figure. “All this call-me-by-my-first-name, I’ll-drink-a-pint-with-you bulls**t.” This subplot ­underpins a ­wonderfully ­entertaining and lucid account, written with wit, pace and clarity.Rosa: A book takes a long time! Or it does for me anyway. You have to be interested in – close to obsessed with – so many different elements of the world and story to get through the marathon of it. Place was, as it often is for me, the starting point. Margate, past and present, weird and hard and beautiful, emblematic of the tidal high-and-low nature of the British seaside. I knew I wanted to write that. I knew I wanted it to be in the close future, I knew I wanted to write a love story between two young women, and really try and pin down in words the extraordinary, blinding power of that. The abject horror of current political leaders, and the way the class system affects every element of life in Britain – I want to write socially realistic novels, so those things can’t be avoided. And throughout this accomplished book, the reader is frequently reminded that a new empire is relentlessly extending its sinister reach – the superpower that is China, exploiting every opportunity to gain power and undermine its rival, the US. The setting is Margate, sometime in the all too near future. “Shoreditch-on-Sea”, as it once was known, has gone from offering “charity shops, chip shops, shut shops” to food banks and “kem”, a drug on which the locals are hooked. Narrator Chance arrived as a small child, funded by the government to leave an overcrowded London along with her protective big brother, JD, and Jas, their young mother, an art school dropout whose brightness is dimmed by addiction. Eventually, JD’s pumped-up, volatile business partner, Kole, joins their band and later a baby boy named Blue arrives. ‘Liquid grace’: Rosa Rankin-Gee. The Mirror's travel newsletter brings you the latest news and expert analysis from across the industry, as well as plenty of travel inspiration.

Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee review – seat-edge tension in

From the Booker shortlisted author of The Mars Room comes this collection of essays and articles gathered together from the last two decades. The long time span doesn’t reduce the freshness of Kushner’s prose as she takes on topics ranging from a visit to a Palestinian refugee camp to her love of classic cars.Your mum, Maggie Gee, has written on similar themes, most recently in The Red Children . Is there any kind of rivalry between the two of you about who gets to tell speculative stories set on the Kent coast? This march to an increasingly unjust society rife with social inequality and political extremism is documented through the eyes of Chance, a young girl-then-woman who has been brought to the fading coastal resort of Margate by her once middle class, now junkie mother who has a predilection for choosing the entirely wrong type of men. Whether it’s the sky or the light or something else altogether Thanet still feels like elsewhere, somewhere separate, still carrying the sensations and name of an island even though the channel that once cut it adrift silted up half a millennium ago. You can barely see the join now, but you can definitely feel it.

Dreamland by Rankin Gee Rosa - AbeBooks Dreamland by Rankin Gee Rosa - AbeBooks

I think that brings us to your last near-future dystopia book recommendation, which is Z for Zachariah by Robert C O’Brien. It was completed by his wife and daughter posthumously. Dreamland – which shares its name with the long-established amusement park on Margate seafront – is a novel seven years in the making, its gestation predating the division caused by the build up to and fallout from Brexit. The B-word doesn’t appear in the book but the related and growing divides in our society are portrayed and expanded in unflinching terms. Things can be rubbish, but then you see a sky like that and it’s like – I have that. That’s mine,” says Chance of a Margate sunset. “Which is why I wanna look in that direction. Not behind me.”With zero employment opportunities, JD begins dealing drugs while Chance, aged 13, develops a talent for breaking into empty properties. Chance’s voice is naïve and knowing – she’s barely out of childhood but has had to hone her survival instinct from an early age. Chance’s mother wades through a succession of unsuitable men, until JD’s business partner, Kole, drifts into their orbit and Jas develops an unhealthy obsession with him. Kole moves the family into a claustrophobic high-rise flat overlooking the sea. He is a cold, controlling presence, and Jas fails to protect her children from his machinations. On the wires between his building and the one across the street, there were sparrows perched, evenly spaced, like fairy lights.” Rosa Rankin-Gee’s novel is very much about this – about poor families given “grants” to move out of London in a not-too-distant future where the temperature and sea levels have risen and the rich are moving further inland. One such family happens to be Chance’s, the young queer narrator of this novel, who gets moved around from hostel to hostel with her brother and mother, until finally settling in Margate, a once thriving English seaside town that crumbled when cheap holiday flights became available to Europe. Life is at first OK for Chance, she makes friends in town and learns to scavenge abandoned homes. But as the ocean moves further and further inland, their lives fall apart.