#BlogTour-‘The Disappeared’ by Amy Lord

About the book…

Winner of a Northern Writers’ Award

Longlisted for The Bath Novel Award

*

What if reading the wrong book could get you arrested?

In a decaying city controlled by the First General and his army, expressing the wrong opinion can have terrible consequences. Clara Winter knows this better than anyone. When she was a child, her father was taken by the Authorisation Bureau for the crime of teaching banned books to his students. She is still haunted by his disappearance.

Now Clara teaches at the same university, determined to rebel against the regime that cost her family so much – and her weapons are the banned books her father left behind. But she has started something dangerous, something that brings her to the attention of the Authorisation Bureau and its most feared interrogator, Major Jackson. The same man who arrested Clara’s father.

With her rights stripped away, in a country where democracy has been replaced with something more sinister, will she be the next one to disappear?

*

`Provocative and prescient, The Disappeared is an unflinching tale of resistance in dark political times. Set in a near-future Britain where books are banned, this is a thought-provoking dystopian debut.’ – Caroline Ambrose, Founder of The Bath Novel Award

Many thanks to Anne Cater of Random Things Book Tours and Unbound for the blog tour invite and my gifted paperback copy of ‘The Disappeared’ by Amy Lord!
I am super psyched about this one, bookish peeps, WHAT A READ!

This book is LIT!

AND I am not one to exaggerate,. I LOVE Unbound, their catalogue of crowd funded books stands head and shoulders above many other indie oeuvres, and this book, this is on fire.

From the opening scene where Clara watches as her father is dragged away by armed militia for having ‘dangerous’ ideas and reading illegal books, to the gripping and heartrending conclusion, this is absolutely a book for these times.

The idea of books, the notions inside them creating and driving readers and writers to think for themselves is not new, it has been done before so to take this and make it your own in your debut novel shows an author with absolute conviction in her soul about her writing.

This book lives and breathes through Clara’s dystopian existence as she engages her boyfriend, Simen, in her plan to use the forbidden books in the university where she works to teach. A subversive army whose ideas are spread through symbiosis, from page to brain and brain to action, this is a call to arms.

The future that Amy Lord paints is not a great distance from our own and that is what makes it so believable.

We live in a world where countries ban books because they feature a ‘permissive’ attitude to sex, homosexuality, break the ten commandments or, in the case of the Harry Potter books, encourage children to practice withcraft ( come on ! this seems so incredibly far fetched until you see the pictures of burning books and suddenly, the laughter chokes in your throat. It no longer seems ludicrous but terrifying.)

Books are gateways to another world and when their are censored and hidden away they become even more vital.

‘The Disappeared’ is actually about making it visible, taking the ones who were vanished by the new regime, led by a terrifying dictator, Major JAckson,who wants a following of non thinking sheep, not rational questioners  and giving them back their agency. I LOVED IT!

About the author…

Amy Lord is a writer and blogger and digital marketer from  North East England.She won a Northern Writers Award in 2015 for ‘The Disappeared’ and was also longlisted for the innaugral Bath Novel Award.

An earlier manuscript saw her shortlisted for Route’s Publishing ‘Next Great Novelist Award’. Amy is currently working on her new novel,which was developed as part of a year long mentoring scheme with Writers Block NE.

Links-http://randomthingsthroughmyletterbox.blogspot.com/p/services-to-publishers-authors-blog.html

https://unbound.com/