![]() ![]() ![]() But one thing leads to another, and soon she’s on the run with the intriguing Hole in the Wall Gang, whose charismatic leader, the Kid, has a utopian dream that’s going to need the heist of all heists to finance it. When Ada finds herself in this tightest of spots, her mother is able to get her to safety. If they can’t, they risk being deemed ‘barren’, and possibly, if things go badly, being branded a witch - with deadly consequences. Grief, trauma and the need to reproduce has made fertility and child-bearing an obsessive social focus, and young wives are watched like hawks in their first year of marriage to see if they can successfully conceive. The town’s name is a clue to the novel’s subject: around 60 years earlier, the Great Flu swept through the land, decimating the population and creating what is effectively a religious cult of the child. Anna North, Outlawed, Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2021 (USA)įirst line: In the year of our Lord 1894, I became an outlaw.Īnna North’s Outlawed treats us to a beautifully realised alternative America of 1894, where seventeen-year-old Ada lives with her sisters and midwife mum, Evelyn, in the Dakota town of Fairchild. ![]()
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