They - Dick, Kay, Machado, Carmen Maria

Introduced by Carmen Maria Machado, the radical dystopian classic, lost for forty years: in a nightmarish Britain, THEY are coming closer… ‘A creepily prescient tale … Insidiously horrifying!’ Margaret Atwood ‘Deft, dread filled, hypnotic and hopeful. Completely got under my skin.’ Kiran Millwood Hargrave ‘A masterpiece of creeping dread.’ Emily St. John Mandel ‘Crystalline … The signature of an enchantress.’ Edna O’Brien ‘Lush, hypnotic, compulsive … A reminder of where groupthink leads.’ Eimear McBride ‘A masterwork of English pastoral horror: eerie and bewitching.’ Claire-Louise Bennett ‘I’m pretty wild about this paranoid, terrifying 1977 masterpiece.’ Lauren Groff This is Britain: but not as we know it. THEY are coming closer . . . THEY begin with a dead dog, shadowy footsteps, confiscated books. Soon the National Gallery is purged; eerie towers survey the coast; savage mobs stalk the countryside destroying artworks – and those who resist. THEY capture dissidents – writers, painters, musicians, even the unmarried and childless – in military sweeps, ‘curing’ these subversives of individual identity. Survivors gather together as cultural refugees, preserving their crafts, creating, loving and remembering. But THEY make it easier to forget … Lost for over forty years, Kay Dick’s They (1977) is a rediscovered dystopian masterpiece of art under attack: a cry from the soul against censorship, a radical celebration of non-conformity – and a warning.