We are delighted to have Heather Critchlow and Dominic Nolan instore to chat about their new books The Tomorrow Project and White City.
The Tomorrow Project:
The unmissable new speculative novel for fans of Station Eleven, The End We Start From and The Last of Us.When the end comes, what will you wish you had done?
In 2050s London, fear grips like a vice as a deadly virus sweeps the globe. The British prime minister tells her people to remain calm. A vaccine will be available soon, and as a precautionary measure children will be whisked away to undisclosed locations, kept safe until the storm passes.
Marianne, Downing Street press secretary, doesn’t realise the futility until it is far, far too late. When the truth hits her, Marianne is forced to choose: stay with her family, or do whatever she can to help the doomed survive.
As London falls, seven-year-old Maia is one of the last to escape the city. In an evacuation camp, she binds herself to Finn: in the absence of everything she knew, he becomes her everything.
Yet as the years roll on and hope fades, Maia sees the bubble of safety is also a prison. She realises there is only one choice: to leave the camp and find what remains on the outside.
White City:
It's 1952, and London is victorious but broken, a city of war ruins and rationing, run by gangsters and black-market spivs.
An elaborate midnight heist, the biggest robbery in British history, sends newspapers into a frenzy. Politicians are furious, the police red-faced. They have suspicions but no leads. Hunches but no proof.
For two families, it is more than just a sensational headline, as their fathers fail to return home on the day of the robbery.
Young Addie Rowe, daughter of a missing Jamaican postman and drunk ex-club hostess mother, struggles to care for her little sister in a dilapidated Brixton rooming house.
Claire Martin, increasingly resentful of roads not taken, strives to make the rent and keep her teenage son Ray from falling under unsavoury influences in Notting Dale.
She finds herself caught between the interests of dangerous men who may know the truth behind her husband's disappearance: Dave Lander, whose reserved nature she finds difficult to reconcile with his reputation as a violent gang enforcer, and Teddy 'Mother' Nunn, a sociopathic, evangelising outlaw and top lieutenant in Billy Hill's underworld.
Drawn together through the years in the city's invisible web of crime and poverty, the fates of the broken families and violent men collide in 1958, as the West Indian community of Notting Hill's slums come under attack from thugs and Teddy Boys. For Addie, Claire, Dave and Mother, old scores will be settled and new dreams chased in the crucible of London's violent summer.
We hope to see you there!
