Widowland

CJ Carey, Quercus, £14.99

A slow burn with a rush of culminating action, Carey’s intricately detailed portrait of a 1950s dystopia where Britain is ruled by Nazi Germany is convincingly cruel in its reimagining of history.

Rippling with Orwellian echoes, it is more than its genre of historical fiction thriller. With echoes of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian fiction, Widowland champions a clear feminist statement as it follows Rose, an upper caste woman of privilege within the regime.