Dark Lullaby

by Polly Ho-Yen Narrated by Eva Feiler

Overview

For fans of Black Mirror and The Handmaid's Tale, in Dark Lullaby a mother desperately tries to keep her family together in a society where parenting standards are strictly monitored.
Kit is an 'out', she doesn't want children. Infertility is universal and she has witnessed the agonies of her friends and sister going through the painful and dangerous fertility treatment, Induction, and then struggling to keep their babies, and cannot face going through it herself. But then she meets Thomas, and gradually the idea of a baby becomes more and more important. She and Thomas go through Induction and have a baby girl, Mimi. At first everything goes well but then the small mistakes, ISPs (Insufficient Standard of Parenting), build up and suddenly Kit is face to face with the idea of losing Mimi, and she is forced to ask herself how far she will go to keep her family together.
“A heart-wrenching and beautifully told novel, absolutely compelling, and scarily plausible. This is the best kind of speculative fiction: thoughtful, committed, alert to the outlines of a possible near-future, that inhabits your mind long after reading. One of the most important books to be published this year.” MARIAN WOMACK, author of The Golden Key
“An expertly crafted exploration of love and loss, with a truly haunting conclusion. Intimate, often poetic prose shines bright through the encroaching dread. Bleak, beautiful and bittersweet at every turn. I loved it.” MARTYN FORD, author of Every Missing Thing
“Polly Ho-Yen masterfully balances eerie, dream-like prose with a distressingly realistic portrayal of a world where reproductive right has become reproductive responsibility. To be a parent is to live with your heart outside your body and, through smart world-building, memorable characters and sharp insight, Dark Lullaby perfectly encapsulates the power and terror of that love.” DAVE RUDDEN, author of The Wintertime Paradox
“Dark Lullaby is hard-hitting, mournful and deeply affecting, reading like the offspring of Never Let Me Go and 1984, and it addresses universal fears about early parenthood without providing easy answers. I raced through it and when I'd finished, it made me hug my own children tight.”
TIM MAJOR, author of Hope Island
“With fabulous world-building and a plot so tight you could bounce a quarter off of it, Dark Lullaby is a Handmaid's Tale for the modern world, about the ways our human need for love can serve as both society's salvation, and its undoing.” SARAH LANGAN, author of Good Neighbors
“This gripping thriller has everything: beautiful writing, shedloads of tension, family drama. It made me grateful for my fragile freedoms.” EMILY KOCH, author of If I Die Before I Wake

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

01/18/2021

Middle grade author Ho-Yen (Fly Me Home) falters in her switch to adult fiction, an emotional dystopian story grounded in cultural anxiety around motherhood, but seated in an underexplored and often contradictory future world. Infertility has become nearly universal and government surveillance ubiquitous. Wealthy women can afford XC babies, created in laboratories and brought to term in artificial wombs, while others are encouraged to become pregnant via a painful, sometimes fatal, induction process—and shunned if they refuse. Once those babies are born, any minor parenting mistake can yield an Insufficient Parenting Standard citation, and if enough accumulate, the child is taken to be raised in a mysterious government camp. When Kit’s daughter, Mimi, is seized, Kit goes on a quest to find her and uncover the truth of the system. Ho-Yen’s characters are cowed by what seems a very haphazard process, have no understanding of their totalitarian government, and are apparently unperturbed that no one has ever seen the child compounds or reported being raised in one; this might be forgiven in a more allegorical treatment, but in the personal narrative Ho-Yen attempts, the plot holes gape. The abrupt ending, meanwhile, relies on a last-hour “gotcha” that feels cheap. The cultural critique is strong, but the execution is not. (Mar.)

From the Publisher

'Dark Lullaby is hard-hitting, mournful and deeply affecting, reading like the offspring of Never Let Me Go and 1984, and it addresses universal fears about early parenthood without providing easy answers. I raced through it and when I’d finished, it made me hug my own children tight.' Tim Major, author of Hope Island.

"With fabulous world-building and a plot so tight you could bounce a quarter off of it, Dark Lullaby is a Handmaid's Tale for the modern world, about the ways our human need for love can serve as both society's salvation, and its undoing."
Sarah Langan, author of Good Neighbors

'This gripping thriller has everything: beautiful writing, shedloads of tension, family drama. It made me grateful for my fragile freedoms.' 
Emily Koch, author of If I Die Before I Wake  

“Dark Lullaby is a gripping story of love and desperation, of intimate and social structures, of sisterhood and motherhood that rings true as a bell. I devoured it.” Deirdre Sullivan, author of Perfectly Preventable Deaths

"Polly Ho-Yen masterfully balances eerie, dream-like prose with a distressingly realistic portrayal of a world where reproductive right has become reproductive responsibility. To be a parent is to live with your heart outside your body and, through smart world-building, memorable characters and sharp insight, Dark Lullaby perfectly encapsulates the power and terror of that love." Dave Rudden, author of The Wintertime Paradox

"A heart-wrenching and beautifully told novel, absolutely compelling, and scarily plausible. This is the best kind of speculative fiction: thoughtful, committed, alert to the outlines of a possible near-future, that inhabits your mind long after reading. One of the most important books to be published this year." Marian Womack, author of The Golden Key

"An expertly crafted exploration of love and loss, with a truly haunting conclusion. Intimate, often poetic prose shines bright through the encroaching dread. Bleak, beautiful and bittersweet at every turn. I loved it." Martyn Ford, author of Every Missing Thing

"Extrapolating from current trends in our surveillance society, it’s horrifyingly plausible" - The Guardian

"I cannot praise this book enough...this book perfectly describes what women go through as mothers, vacillating between being so happy we have a child to feeling like we can’t do this and probably never should have." -Seattle Book Review 5 star Review

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172796012
Publisher:	W. F. Howes Ltd
Publication date:	05/20/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged

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