What I’m Reading David Lowe

She’s a Killer from New Zealand writer Kirsten McDougal leads the reader into a dystopian world damaged by climate change and a near-future Aotearoa overrun by rich immigrants, ‘‘Wealthugees’’.

Alice battles for existence contending with crippling prices, a

mundane job, a mother with whom she communicates in morse code and two friends, one imaginary and the other seemingly perverted by the Wealthugees.

The novel is gripping with its excursions into the mind of a troubled genius and chilling foretelling of likely competition in a country beginning to be ravaged by climate change.

It’s both disturbing and entertaining and, in a critical decade where carbon emissions have to be reduced and the world is dependent on the outcomes of COP26, a must-read.

In Klara and The Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara is an artificial friend created to observe the behaviour of humans. She is sold to a mother who wants Klara to provide a close and empathetic companion for her sick teenage daughter.

The novel by Nobel Literature Prize winning Ishiguro is brilliant with its insights into different kinds of love, loyalty and prejudice.

It’s written in a deceptively simple style that leaves you pondering aspects of the story long after you’ve finished the book – I learned a lot about my own preconceptions reading it.

It’s more than 35 years since Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale shocked the world with its vision of Gilead, a brutal theocracy run in a future USA where male religious leaders control life and death and, due to climate change and pollution, virtually all women are infertile.

Now Atwood’s The Testaments narrated through the voices of two teenage girls and an older woman, a Gilead ‘‘Aunt’’, acts as a kind of antidote to The Handmaid’s Tale negotiating dark secrets and despair towards a surprising ending.

I really enjoyed the book – it’s a page-turner and well worth a read.