The Quickening Author: Claire McGowan ISBN-13: 978-1472160423Publisher: Corsair Guideline Price: ££22; 324pp The year is 2040, and the not-so distant future that Claire McGowan conjures up is both horribly recognisable and grotesquely unfamiliar. The Hope Party has transformed Great Britain. With the environment protected by Future Generations laws, the countryside has rewilded. Children’s rights have been prioritised, and the birth rate is rising steadily. And the downside to these gains? Freedom. Women’s bodies are aggressively monitored through digital bracelets. The “old shame around periods and babies” has returned, and contraception and abortion are illegal, punishable by removal to a re-education camp (these sound like US Ice detention centres). In McGowan’s dystopian world, only the unborn are protected.Karen is a paralegal whose career stalled while her husband’s thrived. As with so many other women – including her doctor sister, Issy – she has learned to keep her head down and go along with the status quo. Karen’s teenage son is enthralled by the government’s misogynist rhetoric, and his twin sister Charlotte is hoping to get the grades for Cambridge. But when Charlotte reveals she is pregnant, Karen suddenly pictures her daughter’s future going up in flames, just as her own once did. Concealing the pregnancy is not an option because Charlotte’s digital bracelet will reveal the truth. Panicked and furious, Karen asks Issy for help. When Charlotte’s pregnancy is revealed to be ectopic and life-threatening, the three women go on the run, hoping the underground resistance can help them escape to safety in Ireland. Only now does Karen realise she has spent years, “worrying about the silt of life while all along the waters were rising about her ears”.Alternating between the three women’s perspectives (Charlotte’s is particularly clear and moving), this is a powerful novel of motherhood, cowardice and courage. Much of the story concerns Karen, Issy and Charlotte’s days on the run, and while this quest is effective as the extended howl of rage one imagines the author intended, the cat-and-mouse repetition of their attempts to evade capture causes the energy to flag in places. This novel asks what people need to resist? How should fury be deployed? As with Martin Niemöller’s poem First They Came, The Quickening wants to know: if we are not speaking out for others, who will be left to speak out for us?