London, England. November 19th, 2017.
Four hundred and fifty years from now, England will be unrecognisable to today’s inhabitants; a desert archipelago. The green patchwork quilt of the south and the east, will either be under water or burnt to dust by heat caused by man-made climate change. Britain’s coastal and riverside cities will long have succumbed to flooding, their historic buildings lost. The coastline itself will have been re-drawn. There will be new islands, like those made from the former North York Moors. Climate change will have raised global average temperatures over 10°C. In the south, being outside, even in the shade, will cause potentially lethal levels of heat stress in humans.
Jule Owen’s new novel, The Kind vividly brings to life a possible future world. Jule says, ‘As scientists gather more evidence about climate change, it is becoming increasingly obvious that we are handing an impossible and terrifying legacy to the young and to unborn generations. We are living at a time of extraordinary technological advance and availability of knowledge, and yet we are marching forward with self-destructive intent, apparently unable to change our behaviour. I wrote this novel to try to imagine a version of that future world.’
Jule Owen was born in Merseyside and now lives in London. She had spent many years helping to make software and is fascinated by science, technology and the future.
It is 2472. The wealthy and privileged have retreated to high-tech walled cities. Those beyond the walls are known as the Non-Grata. They live a precarious, hand-to-mouth existence, surviving on the “charity” of the cities. In return, these non-people must pay a Quota, a tax paid in human life. Specifically, they give the rich something their money cannot buy: children.
Isobel Twelvetrees has been put outside the walls of her city and left to die in the lethal heat for a crime she cannot remember committing. She was saved by someone or something, but when she wakes, the only companion she has is a dog with odd coloured eyes. When she learns the terrible truth about the plight of the Non Grata, she turns into a new kind of warrior. As she crosses continents with the threadbare armies of the Non Grata, in a deadly race against time to destroy the Quota and right historic wrongs, she starts to uncover the truth about herself and what she left behind.
The Kind is published by Mean Time Books and will be available to buy from all major bookshops in early December 2017.
www.juleowen.com
[email protected]
@juleowen