But the record company want a bigger fan base and the ill-fated musical showcase seems the ideal solution. David Seabrook’s 2002 All the Devils Are Here depicted Kent’s coast as both a bolthole and a blind alley for a motley, menacing band of eccentrics.

Dreamland — Rosa Rankin-Gee

And yet in Rosa Rankin-Gee’s superbly gripping and deeply, emotionally resonant novel, Dreamland, where all of these disturbing trends have reached a nightmarishly definitive crescendo, when hope and the capacity for fierce unconditional love should have reached an irretrievable nadir, the ability to believe in better things to come is somehow still alive, and if not well, at least present and accounted for. The hope and love that Rankin-Gee celebrates throughout Dreamland, the world of which is as dystopian as you can get, feel incredibly muscular, real, and authentic.Fizzing with energy and lyricism, this provocative debut tackles racism, the pleasures and pitfalls of creativity, and ultimately celebrates music and its power to transform lives.

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

I started flicking through this book again just before we spoke and I felt like I wanted to be back in this world straight away. Dreamland brings us face-to-face with much of what were on the threshold of losing; nevertheless, it manages to convince us that its characters have everything still to live for. Although Rankin-Gee’s nuanced, astute world building deserves applause, it’s this relationship that holds the novel together, in large part because it feels so real. As we picture a trolley passing through pushed awkwardly by someone in an ill-fitting waistcoat we learn instead that “the man with the snacks had nothing officially to do with the train, he was a random guy with a scuffed Bag for Life full of multipacks”.A lot of what’s happening to us— climate change, the spectre of war, a pandemic—are worked out or grappled with through these novels. Little does she know, however, that she and Franky are caught up in something much bigger than themselves. As the space race gathers pace, and great powers including the US, Russia and China integrate space warfare into their military budgets, it is increasingly likely to become another source of geopolitical tension. 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. Sixteen-year-old narrator Chance has to grow up fast in this crumbling bolthole, isolated from what remains of functioning society, as she battles to protect her big brother JD and her mother Jas from violent criminals and the oblivion of cheap booze and suspect chemical highs.