Today it's an absolute pleasure to take art in the BlogTour The Waiting Rooms by Eve Smith.
Eve Smith writes speculative fiction, mainly about the things that scare her. She attributes her love of all things dark and dystopian to a childhood watching Tales of the Unexpected and black-and-white Edgar Allen Poe double bills. In this world of questionable facts, stats and news, she believes storytelling is more important than ever to engage people in real life issues.
Set twenty years after an antibiotic crisis,her debut novel The Waiting Roomswas shortlisted for the Bridport Prize First Novel Award. Her flash fiction has been shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award and highly commended for The Brighton Prize.
Follow @evecsmith on Twitter, on Goodreads, Visit evesmithauthor.com, Buy The Waiting Rooms
About the book
Decades of spiralling drug resistance have unleashed a global antibiotic crisis. Ordinary infections are untreatable: a scratch from a pet can kill. A sacrifice is required to keep the majority safe: no one over seventy is allowed new antibiotics. The elderly are sent to hospitals nicknamed ‘The Waiting Rooms.’ Hospitals where no one ever gets well.
Twenty years after the crisis takes hold, Kate begins a search for her birth mother, armed only with her name and her age. As Kate unearths disturbing facts about her mother's past, she puts her family in danger and risks losing everything.
Because Kate is not the only secret that her birth mother is hiding. Someone else is looking for her, too.
Sweeping from an all-too-real modern world to a pre-crisis South Africa, The Waiting Rooms is epic in scope, richly populated with unforgettable characters, and a tense, haunting vision of a future that is only a few mutations away.
There will probably be a consensus about how freakishly timely this plot is given the whole Covid-19 situation we are living in at the moment.
Kate is on the frontline of life and death, perhaps it's better to say death and more painful death. The world post-catastrophe is one of division, policies and a general lack of humanity. Lily is on the cusp of entering the disposable human age and Mary takes readers back to a time before a new-age plague changes the world forever.
Woven into this dystopian tale are the very real threats that govern policy choices when it comes to healthcare and costs. Antimicrobial resistance has been laid at the feet of decades of overuse of antibiotics and the lack of new drugs to combat new strains. In this scenario cost cutting measures are written and put into place to the detriment of the elderly. Everyone above the age of seventy is no longer given anything to combat any infection. It's a little more complicated than that obviously, but I don't want to give everything away.
It's a Logan's Run scenario, for those who remember the old nugget. People are sorted into two categories - before and after the cut-off date. There is only fear, pain and the feeling that death has become a well-oiled machine that makes a profit.
I thought it was interesting how Smith drew in the topic of euthanasia. Having a directive or not becomes the difference between painless choice or painful torture, which is clouded by public opinion viewing it as murder.
Smith is an excellent storyteller. Dredging every fear that goes through our heads, things none of us can possibly control and are unable to fathom in their entirety, to create a frighteningly realistic futuristic scenario. Then as if the science, medicine and fear weren't enough the author raises the stakes by adding a complex family dynamic and our possible future to the mix. It's an incredible read.
Buy The Waiting Rooms at Amazon Uk or go to Goodreads for any other retailer. Publisher: Orenda Books; pub date ecopy - 9 April 2020. - pub date Paperback 9 July 2020. Buy at Amazon com. Buy at Orenda Books.
Thanks so much for the blog tour support xx
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