Before She Sleeps
07 September 2020Synopsis
'Fascinating angle on "emotional work"' MARGARET ATWOOD on Twitter
'Thrilling' LOS ANGELES TIMES
'Haunting' PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In modern, beautiful Green City, the capital of South West Asia, gender selection, war and a virus outbreak have brought the ratio of men to women to alarmingly low levels.
The government uses terror and technological surveillance to control its people, and women must take multiple husbands...
Details
07 September 2020
9789389109757Reviews
'Female-centered #Dystopia from #Pakistan: Before She Sleeps, Bina Shah. Fascinating new angle on "emotional work"!' MARGARET ATWOOD on Twitter
'A haunting, dystopian thriller… Fans of The Handmaid’s Tale won’t want to miss this one' PUBLISHERS WEEKLY starred review
'An overdue enlargement of the cultural conversation that [The Handmaid’s Tale] continues to provoke' KIRKUS REVIEWS
'Charged and thrilling … exquisite … Shah develops her multiple characters beautifully…a thoughtful novel that will stick with me for a very long time' LOS ANGELES TIMES
'The most subtly disturbing of dystopias, richly textured and appallingly intimate, Before She Sleeps has hints of Huxley and Atwood but is uniquely Bina Shah' NICK HARKAWAY, author of Gnomon and The Gone-Away World
'The 21st century answer to The Handmaid’s Tale… Gripping, smart and dystopian in the most terrifying way, which is to say that it seems so very possible. Green City is the glossy, AI-powered, deeply misogynistic technocracy of our nightmares, which the free yet confined women of the Panah desperately struggle to defy' MOLLY CRABAPPLE, author of Drawing Blood
'A timely novel of women’s resistance and determination. By setting her book in a future Middle East and South Asia, Bina Shah has given us a welcome addition to the feminist dystopian thriller that expands the genre beyond a white-centric gaze. Women’s stories and women’s voices―in all our diversity―are important and Bina Shah’s thriller is a necessary reminder' MONA ELTAHAWY, author of Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution
'Shah’s novel is both explicitly connected to Atwood’s marvel [The Handmaid’s Tale] and working to expand it by imagining what a secular, Middle Eastern Gilead might look like… One of the best books of the second half of 2018' THE MILLIONS
'Provocative' SYFY.COM, One of the Best Books of the Summer
'Before She Sleeps stands on its own as a novel that will have readers contemplating rebellion and revolt, sex and power, and the many ways women’s bodies are sacrificed for the good of society' BOOKLIST
