The Men

Description

Jane Pearson is camping with her husband Leo and their five-year-old son Benjamin, deep in the California woods on an evening in late August. At the moment that she drifts to sleep outside the tent where Leo and Benjamin are preparing for bed, every single person with a Y chromosome vanishes from the world, disappearing from operating theatres mid-surgery, from behind the wheels of cars, from arguments and acts of love. Children, adults, even fetuses are gone in an instant. Leo and Benjamin are gone. No one knows why, how, or where. After the Disappearance, Jane enters a reality she barely recognises, where women must create new ways of living while coping with devastating grief. As people come together to rebuild depopulated industries and distribute scarce resources, Jane reunites with an old college girlfriend, Evangelyne Moreau, leader of the Commensalist Party of America, a rising political force in this new world. Meanwhile, strange video footage called 'The Men' is being broadcast online showing images of the vanished men marching through barren, otherworldly landscapes. Is this just a hoax, or could it hold the key to the Disappearance? From the author of The Heavens, The Men is a gripping, beautiful and disquieting novel of feminist utopias and impossible sacrifices that interrogates the dream of a perfect society.

Sandra Newman is the author of the Bailey's Prize-longlisted The Country of Ice Cream Star, The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done (shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award), Cake, and The Heavens, as well as the memoir Changeling and the hugely successful How Not to Write a Novel. She is a graduate of the University of East Anglia Creative writing programme and now lives in New York.

A dazzling work of speculative fiction * Observer * Heart-breaking. The Men imagines a better world and what we might have to sacrifice to get there, and, at the same time, it's a brilliantly constructed sci-fi thriller, with a premise that hooks you in with a horrifying grip. I loved it * Bridget Collins * 'Almost supernaturally propulsive, sometimes very beautiful... there are strange things here I am unlikely to forget. Sandra Newman is a genius' * Sarah Perry, author of Melmouth * Superb. A novel of hypnotic power and breadth from one of the most supple, dynamic voices around. Newman's talents never fail to impress me * Irenosen Okojie, author of Butterfly Fish * Explosive... Dazzling and lyrical... Truly spectacular * Literary Review * A gripping, haunting novel that miraculously swerves both cheap misandry and the lazy pieties of contemporary rectitude * Spectator * Propulsive * i Paper * The Men really intrigues and disturbs... * Guardian * Compelling and enjoyable * Telegraph * Sandra Newman's fiction is characterised by audacious conceits, utopian thinking and apocalyptic fantasies * Observer * Newman hooks you in with her intriguing premise, asking unnerving questions about our present, and future * Stylist, Book List * A tale of white guilt, climate inaction and the gravitational pull of grief; of what - or who - we are willing to sacrifice to stay comfortable * TLS *