FROM THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE LONGLISTED AUTHOR OF THE WATER CURE
'A gripping, sinister fable' - Margaret Atwood on The Water Cure
Discover this chilling new novel about motherhood and personhood, free will and fate, human longing and animal instinct
Calla knows how the lottery works. Everyone does. On the day of your first bleed, you report to the station to learn what kind of woman you will be. A white ticket grants you children. A blue ticket grants you freedom. You are relieved of the terrible burden of choice. And, once you've taken your ticket, there is no going back.
But what if the life you're given is the wrong one?
Blue Ticket is a devastating enquiry into free will and the fraught space of motherhood. Bold and chilling, it pushes beneath the skin of female identity and patriarchal violence, to the point where human longing meets our animal bodies.
Praise for The Water Cure:
'An eerie, uncanny feminist fable' Sunday Times
'Bold, inventive, haunting. You'll be bowled over by it' Stylist
'An unsettling dark fantasy . . . It lingers long after the final page' Daily Telegraph
'Visceral, hypnotic . . . with one of my favourite endings I've read in a long while' The Pool
'Darkly gratifying, primal and arresting' New Yorker
Industry Reviews
The cool intensity and strange beauty of Blue Ticket is a wonder - be sure to read everything Sophie Mackintosh writes -- Deborah Levy, author of 'Hot Milk'
Dreamlike, tense, compelling... Blue Ticket adds something new to the dystopian tradition set by Orwell's 1984 or Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale... Piercing moments of wisdom and insight drive toward a pitch-perfect ending * The New York Times *
Even more hallucinatory and spiralled than her first [novel]... Terrifying and enchanting in equal measure * Lit Hub, Best New Books to Read This Summer *
This book left me breathless - it is gloriously subversive in its exploration of motherhood and desire. I'll be pressing it on everyone -- Angela Chadwick, author of 'XX'
Both claustrophobic and expansive, dream-like and heart-stoppingly tense. You will want to languish in its world for a very long time -- Lara Williams, author of 'Supper Club'
A dark fable... Mackintosh sensitively conveys resonant questions about motherhood, female solidarity, queer love, and bodily autonomy * New Yorker *
Strange and luminous, spare and precise... A thrilling exploration of what it means to follow one's own longing to the point of destruction and beyond -- Rosie Price, author of 'What Red Was'
Chilling, timely, thought-provoking * Esquire, Best Books of Summer 2020 *
Chilling, haunting, heartbreaking... Mackintosh brings a new sense of pathos to the dystopian novel... A moving and original meditation on freedom, fate, and women's rage * Kirkus, Starred Review *
A must for Handmaid's Tale aficionados * Booklist *
Utterly exquisite - clever and brilliant and heartbreaking. From the dusty road to the salving forest, I absolutely adored it -- Emma Jane Unsworth, author of 'Adults' and 'Animals'
Powerful, Ishiguro-esque... Sophie Mackintosh lays bare many of the fears and realities that face any society's women as they contemplate when their choices begin, and where they might end * Boston Globe *
Told with ragged prose that catches the breath, [Blue Ticket] articulates the irrepressible desires and wounds that can lie deep within, marked by a claustrophobia that never stops pressing in from the margins. This unsettling reimagining of the anxieties and pressures around motherhood lays bare the alienation that comes when your body is not truly yours * Irish News *
A darkly brilliant allegory... Astute, revelatory and heartbreaking
A rich, sharp, and daring book. To read Blue Ticket is to feel so vigorously alert you can feel the world turning
Mesmerising * Daily Nerd *
Mackintosh poses urgent questions about social expectations and free will that are relevant to all realities * Poets and Writers *
Cool, disturbing, it deals with emotionally fraught material. Mackintosh traffics in ambivalence and ambiguity... What Calla really wants, the author shows us, isn't necessarily a baby; it's an answer * Washington Post *
