oth of this week’s books are published by Matador, and they are both of the “what if?” variety. Ian James Krender’s book is actually set in the past – England in the 1980s – but an England that has been ruled by Nazi Germany since the end of WW2. Andrew Tudor’s premise is equally sinister, but we are in a a Britain of the future, and facing a rogue virus which threatens to engulf civilisation.
REGION 6 by Ian James Krender
The author admits to being influenced by Robert Harris, Len Deighton, Philip K Dick, Frederick Forsyth and Stephen King. Region 6 is the bureaucratic name for conquered Britain, and the story begins on 21st June 1983 in the East End of London or, as the Germans call it, Ost Bereich 15. Fifteen year-old Tom and his parents are rounded up by the police and sent to a concentration camp where Tom witnesses his mother being shot in cold blood by a Nazi guard. When he finally returns to Stepney, he vows to join the resistance movement.
Another young man, Stephen, has nothing but praise for the government. They have treated his family well, he has graduated from Cambridge, and now has a job with the Gestapo. He says:
“It was during the 1980s that we enjoyed some of the greatest leaps in living standards thanks to the economic miracle engineered by the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Hunger and poverty had been abolished. I remember feeling an innate optimism as a child.”
Fate sets these two young men on a political collision course, but their lives also become intertwined in a way which neither could have envisaged. Region 6 is out now.
THE ZENO EFFECT by Andrew Tudor
ndrew Tudor is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of York. He was film critic for New Society from 1975 to 1982 and has been chairman of York Film Theatre for more than ten years. In his chilling vision of a future world where population growth has spiraled beyond control, and dystopia threatens, Alison MacGregor, a Scientific Liaison Officer for the Scottish government, discovers evidence that a scientist, angry and disillusioned at the failure of world rulers to get a grip of the situation, has released a genetically engineered virus capable of wiping out whole societies. Together with a senior scientist, a security expert and a young journalist, McGregor battles aginst overwhelming odds to prevent a catastrophe. The Zeno Effect is available now.
fullybooked2017 