About this item
*BELLETRISTS AUGUST 2020 BOOK PICK*"[Mackintoshs] writing is clear and sharp, with piercing moments of wisdom and insight that drive toward a pitch-perfect ending...Blue Ticket adds something new to the dystopian tradition set by Orwells 1984 or Atwoods The Handmaids Tale." --New York Times Book ReviewFrom the author of the Man Booker Prize longlisted novel The Water Cure ("ingenious and incendiary"--The New Yorker) comes another mesmerizing, refracted vision of our society: What if the life youre given is the wrong one?Calla knows how the lottery works. Everyone does. On the day of your first bleed, you report to the station to learn what kind of woman you will be. A white ticket grants you marriage and children. A blue ticket grants you a career and freedom. You are relieved of the terrible burden of choice. And once youve taken your ticket, there is no going back. But what if the life youre given is the wrong one? When Calla, a blue ticket woman, begins to question her fate, she must go on the run. But her survival will be dependent on the very qualities the lottery has taught her to question in herself and on the other women the system has pitted against her. Pregnant and desperate, Calla must contend with whether or not the lottery knows her better than she knows herself and what that might mean for her child.An urgent inquiry into free will, social expectation, and the fraught space of motherhood, Blue Ticket is electrifying in its raw evocation of desire and riveting in its undeniable familiarity.
About the Author
Sophie Mackintosh was born in South Wales in 1988, and is currently based in London. Her fiction, essays and poetry have been published by Granta, The White Review, The New York Times and The Stinging Fly, among others. Her short story 'Grace' was the winner of the 2016 White Review Short Story Prize, and her story 'The Running Ones' won the Virago/Stylist Short Story competition in 2016.Sophie's debut novel The Water Cure was published by Hamish Hamilton in the UK in Spring 2018 and by Doubleday in the US in early 2019 to critical acclaim, and was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize.Her second novel Blue Ticket will be published in Spring 2020.
