With echoes of Emily St John Mandel and Megan Hunter, this haunting literary thriller is about survival, loss and the binds that unite and break us. Chilling, eerie and powerful -- Elizabeth Macneal She is ambitious, industrious, working hard to create whatever they need and investigating their surroundings. He is passive and compliant, spending time on his art projects and acquiescing to their fate. Sara Cox I’m absolutely thrilled we are once again delving between the covers, bringing another selection of seven brilliant brand new books, as well as spanning the decades with seven books by talented authors from across the Commonwealth to celebrate the Jubilee." — Sara Cox

Did I ever tell you how sounds continue to reverberate long after we're able to hear them? They say if you had a powerful enough microphone you could hear conversations that took place years ago." It does also get an Ambiguous Ending Alert ™ though. The ending is in somewhat of a delirium state due to events, so what then occurs can be taken in various ways. You can imagine a 'happy ending' if you like, although realistically it seems unlikely. Anyway, if you don't like those sorts of endings, be forewarned.This is dystopian fiction at its best. Just like the great Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid's Tale, this author doesn't inform the reader of how the world becomes what it is in this story. It takes some time before we learn what crime Aina and Whitney are guilty of, and when we realise, we see the horror that the world has become, it's so clever and so compelling, and nothing is as expected.

When a sheep turns up, they start to question if they are actually on an Island. But the eight hour intervals between their life-saving pills doesn’t give them enough time to explore the island in its totality. There are more clues - but I won’t spoil it. At 60% in there is some excitement, action. Random elements are introduced which offer more depth to the world building but little advancement of any kind of story. The result is chaos, violence and more incomprehensible loose ends. This seven-part series, designed to bring the nation together by sharing the enjoyment of reading, will take the same format as before. In each episode, Sara’s book group of four famous guests will bring along their own book of choice and also discuss a newly published book. The seven selected books are revealed below. Taut, unsettling and so completely charged with both tension and emotion, I found myself captivated by Metronome. I loved the clarity of its vision and the clean intensity of its prose, and I know that its vivid characters and the bleak, brutal beauty of the world they inhabit will haunt my dreams for a long time now, in the absolute best of ways -- Naomi Ishiguro And these pills? Do they really need them to survive? And what exactly has happened that makes them need them?

Second, it’s also a dystopian vision of the world that seems somehow really plausible. I’ve read a lot of near-future dystopias in the last few years. A lot feed on our anxieties about climate change in some way. This does so too, but less obviously, and it doesn’t over explain how we got to this place. We’re just there. A book about guilt, new beginnings, making mistakes or decisions, because of being forced by circumstances. The betrayal by someone the mc thought she could trust, and her struggle with sensing this from the beginning, and the not knowing if she should trust. Instead of leaving the story in a state of complete hopelessness, we are given some hope, which is almost immediately dashed by a 'deus ex machina' event and a scene, which may or may not be an illusion. As if the author didn't have the energy or inspiration to write the story ending he desired.