Dreamland: An Evening Standard 'Best New Book' of 2021

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is touted as the deadline for the world to go carbon neutral and preserve natural habitats. How optimistic are you that we’ll make it?

Rosa Rankin-Gee: Planet Thanet - Bookanista Rosa Rankin-Gee: Planet Thanet - Bookanista

Dreamland is up there with the bleakest books I've read to the point of almost being overwhelming. It imagines a not too distant future where patterns relocating people living in London council houses and climate change merge together with catastrophic consequences. The dread and horror is unrelenting, while also hitting a little too close to home. Your mum, Maggie Gee, has written on similar themes, most recently in The Red Children . Is there any kind of rivalry between the two of you about who gets to tell speculative stories set on the Kent coast? So Australia finds itself adjacent to the economic powerhouse of the 21st century and keen to play a bigger role on the global stage. The big question is who they will choose to play with.Dreamland – which shares its name with the long-established amusement park on Margate seafront – is a novel seven years in the making, its gestation predating the division caused by the build up to and fallout from Brexit. The B-word doesn’t appear in the book but the related and growing divides in our society are portrayed and expanded in unflinching terms. My girlfriend’s the one to speak to about that. She’s a diplomatic advisor to the Marshall Islands, low-lying islands in the Pacific which are an average of 6ft above current sea levels. She says, and for what it’s worth, I entirely agree with her: “We have to stay optimistic. Failure is not an option, because mass devastation is the alternative. Those on the frontlines of climate crisis fight in every forum for this. Ultimately we can’t let interests of a few cause destruction for so many.” You have to hope, and you have to fight. Franky’s arrival awakens something long lost, if it was ever present at all, in Chance, the sense that one person can unconditionally change your life and make it better in a way that a hundred broken-into homes cannot. From there it's a downward spiral,drugs,men,drink... and that's before the massive climate change and collapse of government. There’s even a tubthumping fringe politician who “says it like it is” and keeps saying it like it is until he’s manoeuvred himself into power, ready to turn on the people he’d hoodwinked to get him there.

Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee review – seat-edge tension in

Dreamland is a harrowing look into what happens when your country gives up on you and removes its responsibility for citizens as a whole. London is aptly described as a "fourth world country" by the protagonist. The story begins when Chance and her family receive a monetary incentive to move out of London to the deprived seaside town of Margate. New laws slowly come into place including Localisation, which is the total divestment of control to local councils. The result - abject poverty. The storyline was unpredictable in a fantastic way. There were quite a few developments that I didn't see coming but most don't hit as big twist moments, instead you're subtly given information that allows you to build your own picture. Whether it’s the sky or the light or something else altogether Thanet still feels like elsewhere, somewhere separate, still carrying the sensations and name of an island even though the channel that once cut it adrift silted up half a millennium ago. You can barely see the join now, but you can definitely feel it.It’s a contemporary novel, about a gay man and gay woman who fall in love, but it’s also – in a prequel-esque way – within the Dreamland universe. I’m having a lot of fun with it.

Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee - Signed Edition - Coles Books Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee - Signed Edition - Coles Books

In their new home, they find space and wide skies, a world away from the cramped bedsits they’ve lived in up until now. But challenges swiftly mount. JD’s business partner, Kole, has a violent, charismatic energy that whirlpools around him and threatens to draw in the whole family. And when Chance comes across Franky, a girl her age she has never seen before – well-spoken and wearing sunscreen – something catches in the air between them. Their fates are bound: a connection that is immediate, unshakeable, and, in a time when social divides have never cut sharper, dangerous. Chance's family is one of many offered a cash grant to move out of London - and so she, her mother Jas and brother JD relocate to the seaside, just as the country edges towards vertiginous change. Our reviewer found it hard to imagine reading a better book this year after finishing the ­wonderfully ­entertaining and lucid account of how 10 key world regions are likely to shape our futures.Yes. I suppose that’s why the movie is necessarily a major departure from the book. The movie version is a thriller, with a plot to match. But those characters actually play only bit-parts in the original book. They feel like very separate cultural objects. Indeed the public school-educated man-of-the-people might be punting cheerful birthday greetings from his webcam these days but he came as close as he’s ever come in his attempts to being elected to the House of Commons when he stood in South Thanet in 2015, securing 32% of the vote. With zero employment opportunities, JD begins dealing drugs while Chance, aged 13, develops a talent for breaking into empty properties. Chance’s voice is naïve and knowing – she’s barely out of childhood but has had to hone her survival instinct from an early age. Chance’s mother wades through a succession of unsuitable men, until JD’s business partner, Kole, drifts into their orbit and Jas develops an unhealthy obsession with him. Kole moves the family into a claustrophobic high-rise flat overlooking the sea. He is a cold, controlling presence, and Jas fails to protect her children from his machinations.

Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee | Goodreads Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee | Goodreads

courtesy IMDB (c) Warner Bros. Family Entertainment) Halloween would not be Halloween without Scooby-Doo! somewhere in the hauntingly spooky and hilariously freaky mix and, of course, solving a great mystery which in the case of 1999’s Scooby-Doo! and the Witch’s Ghost is literally bewitching one quaint New England town. The Continue Reading Rosa Rankin-Gee’s novel is very much about this – about poor families given “grants” to move out of London in a not-too-distant future where the temperature and sea levels have ri As I was saying before, I think the best dystopias are really well-judged games of distraction. You’re not always told: this is what’s happening. It’s just happening around you. These two novels are really superb examples of something simultaneously calibrated to the YA audience, and the adult audience. And in the pared-down nature of the story—of it being one girl against these huge world events—something very illuminating and compelling happens. That’s what I’ve tried to do in my book too: there’s a 16-year-old narrator and it’s about her infinitely personal route through huge political and climatic events. I looked out of the window and along the coast. There was this spreading out of light, all of it like fern unfolding in a nature documentary.” My only issue with this book was the ending point. Rankin-Gee weaves some beautiful writing into a story that is often harsh and aggressive, and although I can understand the open-ended imagination prompting ending, I am so invested in these characters that it’s a little disappointing to not know a little more. However, I still gave Dreamland 5 stars because the rest of the book deserves it, and I can understand why the ending could be like it was. However, if you’d like to tell me what happens with a certain child, Rosa, please do!Rosa: A book takes a long time! Or it does for me anyway. You have to be interested in – close to obsessed with – so many different elements of the world and story to get through the marathon of it. Place was, as it often is for me, the starting point. Margate, past and present, weird and hard and beautiful, emblematic of the tidal high-and-low nature of the British seaside. I knew I wanted to write that. I knew I wanted it to be in the close future, I knew I wanted to write a love story between two young women, and really try and pin down in words the extraordinary, blinding power of that. The abject horror of current political leaders, and the way the class system affects every element of life in Britain – I want to write socially realistic novels, so those things can’t be avoided. Set in about 20 years time in a post COVID world, this is an immersive, thought provoking read which is often darkly comic. Best friends Agnes and Bea have just finished secretarial college and, longing for excitement, they tell their parents they’re going travelling round Europe but move into a chaotic house-share in Hampstead and try to lose their virginity. Exactly. Except it had, like, a single pair of underwear and a can of beans in it. But there was this feeling that something might happen, and you need to be ready. I talked about that before—the teetering feeling of fear and hope and agency… catnip to a young teenager. The world is going to hell in a handbasket, politicians are corrupt, the rich get richer at the expense of the poor, and global warming is going to kill us all.