Three Generations. Two Planets. One Code to free them all.
The world did not end with a bang. It was quietly archived by the Hollow Code, an algorithmic tyranny driven by cold capitalism and biometric compliance. For decades in the United Kingdom, those who refused to submit to digital law were systematically erased.
But deep underground beneath the Scottish Highlands, a secret resistance is working to understand the Hollow Code, break its hold and dismantle the invisible cage around humanity.
The Glendarragh Code follows an epic, three generation journey of survival, rebellion and deep love, beginning on Highland moors of Scotland and reaching the stars through the children and grandchildren of those who refused to be forgotten.
At the heart of the rebellion is an unforgettable ensemble:
Mairi Douglas, a former nurse deleted by the system for choosing humanity over compliance.
Alec Sutherland, a stubborn, independent engineer and mechanic who can fix almost anything.
Sorcha Douglas, Mairi's brilliant coder niece, who once built and hacked global corporate satellites.
Ewan Milton, an intellectual and former professor tracing the "soft fracture theory" of systemic collapse.
Callum Gunn, a proud, cane wielding widower carrying the memory of Scotland's rebellions.
Fueled by a rogue artificial intelligence trained on human empathy rather than corporate optimisation, this hidden community escapes underground and begins building a new society. From that refuge rises the foundation of the Spiral Arc, a vast chain of space hubs stretching from Earth to Mars.
But the old regime has not forgotten them.
As it moves to reclaim absolute control, the newly established Spiral Core must stop a terrifying structural siege. When the systems crash and the old world challenges the new, the Glendarragh Code reveals its ultimate cosmic failsafe.
Industry Reviews
Reviewed by N. Fenwick
In Glendarragh Code, her haunting and quietly defiant debut novel, Lisa Marie Heitman-Bruce arrives with a voice at once elegiac and urgent, weaving a tale of collective resistance and intimate ruin amid a post-democratic United Kingdom. The book opens not with a gunshot but with a whisper of a world unraveling slowly, beautifully, fatally. It's less The Hunger Games and more Station Eleven by way of The Handmaid's Tale, though even those comparisons do little justice to the novel's ferocious interiority and grave lyricism.
If Margaret Atwood cautioned us about power, and Emily St. John Mandel about collapse, Heitman-Bruce warns us about compliance and the slow erosion of the self beneath convenience, data, and fear. The novel is set in the not-so-distant year 2032, after Britain has quietly become something unrecognizable. There is no great cataclysm, no alien invasion, no civil war. What there is instead is data compliance: citizens sorted, judged, and erased through predictive algorithms and biometric infrastructure. Neighborhoods disappear into spreadsheets. People vanish into "category non-essential." In the novel's prologue - a dense, allusive piece of prose poetry - the cities fall, not to bombs, but to bandwidth.
It is one of the most arresting openings of recent dystopian fiction: "The ultimate cruelty was not violence. It was irrelevance. No one murdered them; instead, a slow, glacial deletion, devoid of ceremony or even hatred, consigned them to oblivion."
This philosophical quietness is the novel's greatest risk and its greatest reward. There are no easy answers. The resistance does not promise victory, only integrity.
In a culture hungry for spectacle, Glendarragh Code offers something more dangerous: contemplation.
