Decades of spiralling drug resistance have unleashed a global antibiotic crisis. Ordinary infections are untreatable, and a scratch from a pet can kill. A sacrifice is required to keep the majority safe: no one over seventy is allowed new antibiotics. The elderly are sent to hospitals nicknamed 'The Waiting Rooms' ... hospitals where no one ever gets well.
Twenty years after the crisis takes hold, Kate begins a search for her birth mother, armed only with her name and her age. As Kate unearths disturbing facts about her mother's past, she puts her family in danger and risks losing everything. Because Kate is not the only secret that her mother is hiding. Someone else is looking for her, too.
Sweeping from an all-too-real modern Britain to a pre-crisis South Africa, The Waiting Rooms is epic in scope, richly populated with unforgettable characters, and a tense, haunting vision of a future that is only a few mutations away.
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['Kate? We've got a problem. Bed fourteen. Daughter's just pitched up with hubby and how she's raising merry hell']***
(@OrendaBooks, 9 May 2020, 379 pages, ebook, copy from the publisher and voluntarily reviewed, #BlogTour 1 July)
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This is, quite frankly, one of the best books I've ever read. I thought it was incredible. I found the premise equally chilling and entirely plausible. There are two stories running parallel in this book, the crisis and events leading up to it and what the world is like twenty years later. I loved the way the two stories wrap around and bump against each other and finally merge. This is the kind of book you find it hard to put aside one you start to read it because you ABSOLOUTELY MUST FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENS or your life is over. Its dystopian fiction but not really, set in an alternative/parallel world pretty close to the times we live in. It's hard not to see echoes of the COVID-19 pandemic in these pages. Last year the events in this book would have been unbelievable bordering of insanity but they are all too real now. This is an incredible book.
