Widowland (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781728248448)

Widowland is a compulsive, terrifying read.--Kate Quinn, New York Times bestselling author of The Rose Code

For readers of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle comes a thrilling feminist dystopian novel set in an alternative history that terrifyingly imagines what a British alliance with Germany would look like if the Nazis had won WWII.

To control the past, they edited history. To control the future, they edited literature.

LONDON, 1953. Thirteen years have passed since England surrendered to the Nazis and formed a Grand Alliance with Germany. It was forced to adopt many of its oppressive ideologies, one of which was the strict classification of women into hierarchical groups based on the perceived value they brought to society.

Rose Ransom, a member of the privileged Geli class, remembers life from before the war but knows better than to let it show. She works for the Ministry of Culture, rewriting the classics of English literature to ensure there are no subversive thoughts that will give women any ideas.

Outbreaks of insurgency have been seen across the country with graffiti made up of seditious lines from forbidden works by women painted on public buildings. Suspicion has fallen on Widowland, the run-down slums where childless women over fifty have been banished. Rose is given the dangerous task of infiltrating Widowland to find the source of the rebellion before the Leader arrives in England for the Coronation ceremony of King Edward VIII and Queen Wallis. Will Rose follow her instructions and uncover the criminals? Or will she fight for what she knows in her heart is right?

With wit, suspense, and sheer originality, C. J. Carey has crafted an eerie story of what if that explores how some systems of female control cherished by the Nazis would have developed in a German-occupied England.

Praise for Widowland:

Brilliantly conceived and executed, Widowland is a mind-bender of a novel about the power of literature to change minds. I loved it! --Mark Sullivan, bestselling author of The Last Green Valley and Beneath a Scarlet Sky

Storytelling at its best! I rarely come across a book I can't put down but I devoured this one. --Rhys Bowen, New York Times bestselling author of two historical mystery series as well as several internationally bestselling historical novels

Tense, thought-provoking, and terrifying, Widowland is about a woman's search for truth in a world bent on destroying all traces of it. --Natalie Jenner, international bestselling author of The Jane Austen Society and Bloomsbury Girls