Description Hide Description- Show Description+
This is a brilliantly conceived and executed novel of a dystopian future for Australia, extrapolating on many current issues of health, religion, politics, gender and fertility rights, but through the lens of an exciting and suspenseful narrative.
In a post-pandemic Australia, the vaccine which had been dispensed 10 years earlier to try and stop the flu has instead caused widespread infertility. The ruling Nation First party, which has created a Christian fundamentalist theocracy and sponsors Taliban-like morality squads, has banned all remedies for this, including hormone treatment, IVF and surrogacy, only allowing prayer.
In a Melbourne re-fashioned by the prejudice of its new leaders (Southern Cross Station is now called the Station of the Cross), androgynous bicycle courier Salisbury Forth (or Sal for short) works in the busy black-market of illegal fertility - increasing hormones. Caught in the midst of a turf war, and in a secret relationship with a lovely girlfriend ( "gender transgressives" are routinely discriminated against and harassed by 'prayer group' vigilantes), Salisbury has to negotiate the dangers of the post-apocalyptic cityscape and the hostility which hides there. This darkly humorous, fast-paced mystery is Sydney-born Kim Westwood's second novel (after The Daughters of Moab).
Paperback, 327 Pages, Published 2011
Author: Kim Westwood