REDDER DAYS

RELEASED 11 MARCH 272 pages | Hardback/ebook

Author Sue Rainsford

Publisher Doubleday

Sue Rainsford puts a surreal and poetic spin on the apocalypse in this short, sharp and sensual novel.

The fall of civilisation begins with a man purring like a cat before dropping stone dead in front of his wife. And this isn’t an isolated case... Soon an epidemic of “redness” is spreading across the world, changing people and animals in horrifying ways.

Some time later, a pair of strange twins, Adam and Anna, are holed up in a fallen commune with Koan. He was there at the beginning. Night and day, the twins keep watch, dream of their absent mother and prepare for the worldending “Storm” that Koan insists is coming. But can anything he says be trusted?

Rainsford is refreshingly unconcerned with giving you the blow-by-blow of how any of this happened – or indeed how much of it can be taken at face value. The chapters from Koan’s point of view offer a loosely linear account, but there are gaps, and he is far from a reliable narrator.

Instead, Redder Days is a beautifully written, enigmatic nightmare, where isolated people are forced to obey the diktats of a controlling, abusive and possibly entirely delusional misogynist. The book’s refusal to answer all of the questions it poses leads to a confounding conclusion, but one that feels perfectly apt for this visceral, timely and deeply unsettling tale. Will Salmon