Giovanna Fletcher on why her new novel is rooted in reality
As their first joint novel is published, Giovanna and Tom Fletcher talk about the real fears behind the bleak fictional future they’ve created.
Tom and Giovanna Fletcher are known for their upbeat writing — he for his songwriting skills with bands McFly and McBusted and his children’s books, she for her romantic fiction and blogs about being a mum.
Now, the husband-and-wife team have collaborated on a much darker project, Eve of Man, their first novel together — a dystopian tale set in a bleak, futuristic world, which man has all but destroyed, with the population at ground-level battling to cope with a devastated landscape swamped by horrendous flooding against a hazy sky of pollution.
Inexplicably, no females have been born for years, apart from 16-year-old Eve, who is apparently the only hope of saving humanity.
She lives in the Dome at the top of the sky-high Tower, tended to by the Mothers in a world inhabited by hologram humans and at the mercy of a frightening organisation.
Three potential males have been selected for Eve — to help her procreate and save the world — but she falls in love with Bram, not one of the chosen few, and sets out to take back control of her life and find freedom.
It’s essentially a Young Adult love story, set against a backdrop of devastation, and the Fletchers — Tom (32) and Giovanna (33), who is expecting their third child in September — have made a canny crossover, offering existing fans something different and hopefully attracting new ones in the process.
The idea of a society with no females was sparked five years ago, when Giovanna was chatting to a friend who’d just had a baby. “She was just saying how everyone in her street had all had boys.
“I said to Tom, ‘Is that nature? What happens if that happens all the time?’”
Tom continues: “It was one of those, ‘What if ?’, conversations.
I wanted to make sure anything we were talking about could have roots in what’s happening now