Dark Lullaby

by Polly Ho-Yen

Overview

For fans of Black Mirror and The Handmaid’s Tale, a mother desperately tries to keep her family together in a society where parenting standards are strictly monitored.


"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

The world is suffering an infertility crisis, the last natural birth was over twenty years ago and now the only way to conceive is through a painful fertility treatment. Any children born are strictly monitored, and if you are deemed an unfit parent then your child is extracted. After witnessing so many struggling to conceive – and then keep – their babies, Kit thought she didn’t want children. But then she meets Thomas and they have a baby girl, Mimi. Soon the small mistakes build up and suddenly Kit is faced with the possibility of losing her daughter, and she is forced to ask herself how far she will go to keep her family together.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781789094251
Publisher:	Titan
Publication date:	03/23/2021
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	633,067
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.99(h) x 0.91(d)

About the Author

Polly Ho-Yen lives in Bristol with her husband. She used to be a primary-school teacher and now writes fiction for children (9-12 year olds) with a sci-fi or fantasy twist. She has been shortlisted for the Waterstones Children's Book Prize and the Blue Peter Book Award. This is her first adult novel.

Editorial Reviews

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.)

Publishers Weekly

'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

From the Publisher