It has been slightly surreal -preparing to launch a book about a (mostly) dystopian future during a pandemic, but at the same time weirdly comforting being in such familiar territory.
My characters’ lives are restricted by world events, far outside their control. They are physically confined and subject to the whims of the powerful and the shifting sands of politics.
Some things never change.
Elidir is set in 2472, in a world transformed by climate change. It is the second book in The Recoverist Quartet, following on from events in The Kind.
In the first book in the series, we encountered a future where the privileged have retreated to cities with their own micro-climates. Super-storms and heat blast the land beyond these technological marvels. Yet life in the cities is far from perfect. Their populations are dwindling, blighted by a human-made genetic illness.
Isobel Twelvetrees who has been put outside the walls of her city to die in the heat for a crime she cannot remember committing. In the desert, she finds people who survive by selling a quota of their children to the cities in return for food and water. Isobel joins forces with the Kind, a group who have embraced advanced technology banned in the cities. Together they work to free the desert people from having to sell their children.
Elidir picks up when The Kind left off and tells the story of why Isobel was cast out from her protected life in the city.
In the late twenty-fifth century in a place in a place that was formerly the British Isles. The name has been erased from common use and forgotten by everyone but historians. The old buildings, ancient monuments and the familiar green rolling hills have also been obliterated. The coastline has been redrawn by rising seas. Cities have relocated to drier ground. They are islands in a desert of dust and rock. Over the centuries anything of use has been picked clean from the landscape.
Elidir is isolated, even in the context of a world where travel has become the privileged of a few powerful individuals. Elidir has been wiped from official maps because it underneath the mountain at its centre is an archive that preserves priceless remnants of western culture.
Isobel Twelvtrees and Mo Llewelyn are both fascinated by the past, each looking for answers to explain their current existence. Together they investigate a 400-year-old murder. But as they grow closer, their relationship threatens the beliefs and institutions that control them as well as those trying to protect deeper secrets.
More about Elidir here.
Link to Elidir on the UK Amazon store here and US store here.