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

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In 2023, the shortlisted books include a slow-burn mystery set in colonial Australia and a thrilling new novel from the author of Fatherland. We can understand why she wants to be with Francesca, and grab a part of her world, however fleeting. This combination of circumstances built over time to turn Thanet into somewhere ripe for exploitation by populist dog-whistlers. Monique Roffey, author of the Costa Book of The Year The Mermaid of Black Conch Dazzling and shattering Nell Dunn, author of Up The Junction and Talking to Women 'The writing clings like sand. And in the pared-down nature of the story—of it being one girl against these huge world events—something very illuminating and compelling happens.

Rosa Rankin-Gee

Our reviewer found it hard to imagine reading a better book this year after finishing the ­wonderfully ­entertaining and lucid account of how 10 key world regions are likely to shape our futures. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. people displaced in recent years, many seeking to reach Europe, and that number is only set to climb. Is there any kind of rivalry between the two of you about who gets to tell speculative stories set on the Kent coast? By the 1980s the once thriving holiday destination saw its hotels and guesthouses being converted into cheap bedsits, where there was money to be made by landlords trousering government money to house the poor and vulnerable displaced from London and other parts of the south-east by a combination of austerity and the ever-rising cost of living.I think another quality that unites all these books that I really love is how they find ways around exposition. Dreamland is set in a near-future Margate, an turbulent seaside town on the south-east coast of England.

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

A single mum, Jas is offered a cash grant to relocate to Margate with her son JD and daughter Chance. It was the smallest things that made me feel the most,” she says at one point and Rankin-Gee makes this true for the reader, too, whether she’s clocking the nervousness of JD’s laughter around Kole (“like his lungs were clapping”) or the precise shade of a greying tooth dulling Jas’s smile (“tea gone cold”).I’ll just say one thing quickly: I’ve said ‘near-future dystopia’, but I’m also interested in social realism. Where the dystopia succeeds in Dreamland is in its almost mundane familiarity, subverting our perceptions with a relentless succession of minor jolts. Rosa Rankin-Gee is the author of two novels, The Last Kings of Sark, which won Shakespeare and Company’s Paris Literary Prize, and Dreamland, set in a near-future Margate, described as “liquid grace and glinting sparkle” ( The Observer), “enthralling… blazing bright” ( The Guardian), “superb” ( The New European) and “a triumph” ( GQ).

Rosa Rankin-Gee: Planet Thanet - Bookanista Rosa Rankin-Gee: Planet Thanet - Bookanista

And yet in Rosa Rankin-Gee’s superbly gripping and deeply, emotionally resonant novel, Dreamland, where all of these disturbing trends have reached a nightmarishly definitive crescendo, when hope and the capacity for fierce unconditional love should have reached an irretrievable nadir, the ability to believe in better things to come is somehow still alive, and if not well, at least present and accounted for. Some of what he suggested in World War Z feels quite similar to how real-life pandemic responses unfolded. And the light, the light is different there, and when the sun sets over the sea in front of Margate Sands it burns bigger and deeper than anywhere else. Her father Jimmy was a drummer for the band and murdered at the showcase – and she is determined to find out exactly happened. Minor issues present such as mild cracking, inscriptions, inserts, light foxing, tanning and thumb marking.Chance changed as the novel did, but there were always lines or moments or bits of dialogue where I’d think ‘that’s her’, and that allowed me to find her again when at first I lost her.

Dreamland | New Humanist Book review: Dreamland | New Humanist

It has all the pace of a thriller, but also these incredibly beautiful portraits of a place in time: Paris early morning, Paris late at night. But there’s also the novel’s prose – its liquid grace and glinting sparkle – and the sheer irresistibility of a narrative that sweeps along with a force that feels tidal in its pull. Hot on the heels of the aid charities, a mysterious company known as LandSave arrives in Margate and starts to employ local men. As Rankin-Gee points out in a sobering afterword setting the novel in contemporary context, in 2016 alone 500 families every week were sent packing from London in this manner.It’s a portrait of the nation through a very personal lens: Chance’s family are given a grant to leave London and move to the coast, just as sea levels are rising, and more extreme political ideas are taking centre-stage. In Margate, they find a flat and Jas gets a job at a pub, where seven-year-old Chance befriends Davey. Theirs is a great first love, blazing bright and furious amid the poverty and the pain, the perfect counterweight thats needed to make the novel sing.