Blue ticket - Sophie Mackintosh

Man Booker Prize-longlisted author of The Water Cure

RECOMMENDED READING FOR 2020 by Stylist, Evening Standard, Esquire, Red, Daily Mail, Oprah Magazine, LitHub, and Emma Roberts's Belletrist Book Club

'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

'Definitely don't miss the return of Sophie Mackintosh... She's amazing' Stylist, Best Reads of Autumn 2020

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.

'Dreamlike, tense, compelling, [with] a pitch-perfect ending' The New York Times

'Gripping, ethereal, atmospheric' Sunday Times

'Thoughtful and haunting' Observer

'Terrifying and enchanting in equal measure' LitHub

'Blue Ticket will worms its way under your skin and haunt your dreams' Red

Sophie Mackintosh is the author of The Water Cure, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018 and won a Betty Trask Award 2019. She has also won the White Review Short Story Prize and the Virago/Stylist Short Story Competition, and has been published in Granta, The White Review and TANK magazine among others. Her second novel, Blue Ticket, comes out in summer 2020.

Definitely don't miss the return of Sophie Mackintosh... Blue Ticket gets to the root of women's ambivalence and confusion around becoming mothers set against an unsettling dystopia; she's amazing
Stylist, Best Autumn Reads 2020

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

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'

Even more hallucinatory and spiralled than her first [novel]... Terrifying and enchanting in equal measure
Lit Hub, Best New Books to Read This Summer

The Handmaid's Tale as told by David Lynch... A bona fide chase narrative as well as a polyvalent, dream-like allegory of pregnancy and bodily change - not to mention the vortex of judgement that surrounds womanhood... Mackintosh is part of an exciting generation of writers, including Daisy Johnson and Julia Armfield... Blue Ticket stands apart from the crowd
iNews - Anthony Cummins

One of the most disquieting novels I've read in a long time, Blue Ticket will worms its way under your skin and haunt your dreams
Red, 'Best Books of August'

Gripping, ethereal, atmospheric... Mackintosh handles haziness deliberately and with poise, demonstrating the near impossibility of trying to articulate or rationalise maternal desire
Sunday Times

Mackintosh writes with a language drawn from the body.... Impressionistic and haunting in equal measure
Independent - Annabel Nugent

Visceral, primal, striking... This is a potent exploration of biology and agency, motherhood and childlessness, which confirms [Mackintosh] as a writer of note
Daily Mail

Mackintosh is part of a new generation of female writers creating feminist fictions that relate uncannily to our dystopian times... [Her] fiction lives, to an unusual extent, in its musicality, in the rhythm and spareness of its sentences
Guardian Review - Claire Armitstead

For anyone currently waiting with bated breath for the new season of 'The Handmaid's Tale', Booker-longlisted author Sophie Mackintosh's new novel is a feminist dystopia to quench your thirst
Evening Standard

A thoughtful and haunting exploration of freedom, fate and a woman's right to choose her destiny
Observer

Chilling, timely, thought-provoking
Esquire, Best Books of Summer 2020

[Mackintosh] writes with an ethereal lyricism that is equally capable of fragility and violence
Spectator

Blue Ticket offers a completely different angle on a familiar subject... Like all good speculative fiction, [it] reminds us of a truth in the real world
New Humanist

A compelling, unsettling tale... Part-horror, part thriller, and part pregnant-lesbian love story
i

A dark fable... Mackintosh sensitively conveys resonant questions about motherhood, female solidarity, queer love, and bodily autonomy
New Yorker

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

A spare, haunting tale of autonomy and free will
Daily Mail - Anthony Cummins

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'