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RELEASED OUT NOW! 384 pages | Paperback/ebook Author gregory scott Katsoulis Publisher HQ

Sometimes, a book has a central idea so nifty that it’s fun to read even if the execution’s off. Gregory Katsoulis’s debut imagines a near-future US in which patent law is king. Everything – every device, every song, every word – is subject to copyright. From the age of 15, everyone wears a bracelet that monitors communications and charges by the word. Trying to speak while out of credit produces electric shocks to the eyeballs, from corneal implants.

The whole thing is hilariously OTT, as only YA dystopia can manage. Naturally, people are shipped off to do hard labour forever for tiny infractions, naturally the authorities are omnipotent, and naturally there’s a lone teenage girl who defies the system – by choosing not to speak at all – and inspires a revolution.

The tech doesn’t stand up to scrutiny and you’ll spend a lot of the novel wondering why our heroine doesn’t give facial expressions a try. But there are enough evilly clever little touches – case law on what constitutes a chargeable level of shrug, families saddled with crippling debt for illegal downloads three generations ago, the price of words fluctuating according to what’s in the news – to keep you reading, even if you might end up wishing that the ideas had been hooked up to a more interesting plot.