Blue Ticket: A Novel

"Mackintosh’s debut The Water Cure was a dizzyingly ambiguous novel about three sisters kept by their parents from a world that may or may not have been contaminated by some unspecified disaster. It was dazzlingly good, almost suffocatingly claustrophobic, and so I awaited her second outing keenly. How gratifying, then, to find Blue Ticket a tonally similar, and yet somehow entirely fresh work of dystopian fiction. Set in an alternate reality, possibly a dystopian near-future (as in The Water Cure , this is never made explicit), we meet our protagonist Calla as she is allocated a ‘blue ticket’ in the government-sanctioned lottery, which decides which girls should go on to become mothers. A blue ticket marks Calla for a child-free future – one in which she might prioritise independence and career. When we find her a decade or so later she has done just that: she is a scientist by day, hedonist by night. But when she becomes obsessed with the idea of becoming pregnant, and does so by underhand means, she becomes an outlaw and we see how quickly society turns on her. I wrote a longer review of the book for New Humanist magazine, in which I remarked on how speculative fiction allows us to examine moral questions without the normal baggage that we all bring to our reading of a book. “ Blue Ticket reads like an allegory,” I noted, “but the moral we are to take from it is not clear.” This is the pleasure of Mackintosh’s fiction: her heroines are as morally complex as the world they live in. A book that stays with you long after you consign it to the bookshelf."

"Sophie Mackintosh’s Blue Ticket is probably the summer 2020 novel I most feverishly awaited. It’s due to be published later this month in the US, and has been pushed to August in the UK in the wake of the coronavirus crisis. I can promise you that it is worth the wait: if you enjoyed her hallucinatory first book The Water Cure , then you will be delighted with Blue Ticket , which offers another eerily-dreamlike dystopia – this time, set in a world in which young women are randomly allotted their role in life at the onset of puberty (motherhood or childlessness) – that is, they are relieved of the burden of ‘having-it-all’. We meet Calla, a female chemist whose hedonistic lifestyle grinds to a halt when she feels herself driven to impregnate herself against all rules. As with so much speculative fiction , this fantasy world – so alike ours in many ways, and yet so alien in others – offers the opportunity to make close study of aspects of our own society in a vacuum, that is: without the usual baggage that comes with political debate. There’s a beautifully poignant moment when a group of on-the-run pregnant ‘blue ticket’ women take in a ‘white ticket’ woman outlaw who refuses children, an inversion of their own situation, in an awkward yet sympathetic stand-off that spoke much to my and my peers’ present circumstances. Coming up this summer, and available on pre-order now, are new novels from Five Books alumnus Daisy Johnson ( Sisters ) , and the beloved Australian author Kate Grenville ( A Room Made of Leaves ), while Eley Williams – author of the fantastically experimental 2017 short story collection Attrib. and other stories – will publish her first full length novel The Liar’s Dictionary . Ali Smith is to publish the final book of her seasonal quartet, Summer , in early August, while the cult Italian novelist Elena Ferrante will release The Lying Life of Adults , both of which represent major literary events. Look out too for DBC Pierre’s Meanwhile in Dopamine City and Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom come August. Plus be sure to pre-order your copy of Marilynne Robinson’s Jack , due in late September. It’s been a stressful and disconcerting time, these last few months – and there’s no clear end point in sight. Many have been struggling to concentrate on fiction, but for me fiction has always offered an escape, a distraction, food for the soul. So: keep up with new publications if you can, and support the writers who produce them by buying their work, spreading the word and attending online events where you can. Let us know what novels you are enjoying in summer 2020, by getting in touch on Twitter , Facebook or Instagram ."