America, one century on: a warmer climate is causing vast movements of people. Droughts, floods and hurricanes force entire populations to simply abandon their homes. Tensions are mounting between north and south, and some northern states are threatening to close their borders against homeless fellow-Americans from the south.
Against this backdrop, an ambitious young British-born publicist, Holly Peacock, meets a new client, the charismatic Senator Slaymaker, a politician whose sole mission is to keep America together, reconfiguring the entire country in order to meet the challenge of the new climate realities as a single, united nation. When he runs for President, Holly becomes his right hand woman, doing battle on the whisperstream, where stories are everything and truth counts for little.
But can they bring America together - or have they set the country on a new, but equally devastating, path?
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Two hundred miles south of the Azores, warm moist air is rising rapidly. CHAPTER 1
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(@CorvusBooks, 2 November 2017, 367 pages, ebook, borrowed from @GlasgowLib via @OverDriveLibs)
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I became a fan of the author since I read his book Beneath the World, a Sea earlier this year. Since then, I've made it my mission to read all of his books like the obsessive stalker fan I am. This is even better than Beneath the World, a Sea. I devoured it in a couple of hours because I couldn't stop reading it. What impressed me is that the book is supposed to be set around 100 years from now but it felt very current. It could have been set now except for references to AI and whisperstream which is sort of like an AI version of Twitter. A lot of writers would go crazy setting a book 100 years from now and have futuristic AI nonsense all over the place. I loved the fact the author doesn't do this. It makes America City all the more accessible. This is an unusual read for me and not like anything I've read before, a sort of futuristic political novel. The issues plaguing the author's version of America a century from now are the same as issues that plague the country today, immigration and divisions between North/South, rich/poor and black/white. I loved everything about this book.
