Blue Ticket

MAN BOOKER PRIZE LONGLISTED author of The Water Cure

*Recommended Summer Reading 2020 by Esquire, Oprah Magazine, Evening Standard and more*

Belletrist Book of the Month for August

'The cool intensity and strange beauty of Blue Ticket is a wonder - be sure to read everything Sophie Mackintosh writes' Deborah Levy, author of Hot Milk

'Dreamlike, tense, compelling... Blue Ticket adds something new to the dystopian tradition set by Orwell's 1984 or Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale... Piercing moments of wisdom and insight drive toward a pitch-perfect ending' The New York Times

Calla knows how the lottery works. Everyone does. On the day of your first bleed, you report to the station to learn what kind of woman you will be. A white ticket grants you children. A blue ticket grants you freedom. You are relieved of the terrible burden of choice. And, once you've taken your ticket, there is no going back.

But what if the life you're given is the wrong one?

Blue Ticket is a devastating enquiry into free will and the fraught space of motherhood. Bold and chilling, it pushes beneath the skin of female identity and patriarchal violence, to the point where human longing meets our animal bodies.

'Chilling, timely, thought-provoking' Esquire

'A dark fable... Mackintosh sensitively conveys resonant questions about motherhood, female solidarity, queer love, and bodily autonomy' New Yorker

'This book left me breathless - it is gloriously subversive in its exploration of motherhood and desire. I'll be pressing it on everyone' Angela Chadwick, author of XX

'Strange and luminous, spare and precise... A thrilling exploration of what it means to follow one's own longing to the point of destruction and beyond' Rosie Price, author of What Red Was

'Blue Ticket manages to be both claustrophobic and expansive, dream-like and heart-stoppingly tense. You will want to languish in its world for a very long time' Lara Williams, author of Supper Club