Sealed

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Sealed

Title :

Sealed / Naomi Booth.

Title:

Sealed

Author:

Booth, Naomi

Format:

Books

Physical Description:

224 pages ; 21 cm.

Edition:

First Titan edition.

ISBN:

9781789091243

Production / Publication Information:

London : Titan Books, 2019.

Summary:

"Heavily pregnant Alice and her partner Pete are done with the city. Alice is haunted by rumors of a skin-sealing epidemic starting to infect the urban population. She hopes their new remote mountain house will offer safety, a place to forget the nightmares and start their family. But the mountains and their people hold a different kind of danger. With their relationship under intolerable pressure, violence erupts and Alice is faced with the unthinkable as she fights to protect her unborn child. Timely and suspenseful, Sealed is a gripping modern fable on motherhood, a terrifying portrait of ordinary people under threat from their own bodies and from the world around them." --Amazon.com.

Language:

English

Genre:

Suspense fiction.

Psychological fiction.

Science fiction.

Geographic Term:

Australia -- Fiction.

Subject Term:

Pregnant women -- Fiction.

Skin -- Diseases -- Fiction.

Holds: Copies:

Available:*

Material Type	Library	Call Number	Item Barcode	Location
Book	Searching... Hamilton-Wenham Public Library	FIC BOOTH	30470001740843	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Newburyport Public Library	FIC BOOTH N	32128003779932	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

Sealed is a gripping modern fable on motherhood, a terrifying portrait of ordinary people under threat from their own bodies

Heavily pregnant Alice and her partner Pete are done with the city. Alice is haunted by rumors of a skin-sealing epidemic starting to infect the urban population. She hopes their new remote mountain house will offer safety, a place to forget the nightmares and start their family. But the mountains and their people hold a different kind of danger. With their relationship under intolerable pressure, violence erupts and Alice is faced with the unthinkable as she fights to protect her unborn child.

Timely and suspenseful, Sealed is a gripping modern fable on motherhood, a terrifying portrait of ordinary people under threat from their own bodies and from the world around them.

Reviews (2)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Delivering bone-chilling suspense, debut author Booth reimagines dystopian SF as a terrifying modern tale of motherhood. Alice is 36 weeks pregnant, brimming with worry and obsession. As her city is inundated with cases of cutis, a grotesque illness that causes skin to seal over bodily orifices, she and her husband, Pete, move to a remote mountain home. Pete thinks Alice is just obsessed with finding something to fret about, but Alice begins to recognize that their secluded new environment may not be secluded enough. Reeling from the anxiety of impending motherhood, unstoppable biological dangers, and a relationship under unendurable pressure, Alice is left to decide whether her fear is, in fact, unfounded-or whether her paranoia is the only thing that can save her family. Booth paints a picture of good, everyday people under attack from their own bodies; the consistently tense imagery and tone create a vulnerability within the characters that is about individual biology as much as widespread disaster. Readers looking for an all-too-real dystopian scare will find this subtle, intense, deeply unnerving novel makes their skin crawl in the best way. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

In this compelling, anxiety-inducing debut, pregnant Alice is living in rural Australia with her boyfriend, Pete, after they fled the city's debilitating pollution, severe climate change, and an outbreak of a contagious, fatal disease, cutis, which causes human skin to grow unabated. Alice's narration enhances the unrelentingly tension of the plot by making it clear that she is not to be trusted: she has an alarmist view about the severity of the cutis outbreak, she is in deep grief over her mother's death, and she is anxious about becoming a mother. Is she overreacting, or is Alice the only realist in a quickly escalating world crisis? Sealed refuses to be categorized: it is a pre-apocalyptic cautionary tale, an intense psychological thriller, a fable on motherhood, and pure body horror all wrapped in an unsettling package that will stay with readers long after they turn the final page. Fans of Margaret Atwood will enjoy this but librarians should also target readers who enjoyed The Grip of It by Jac Jemc (2017), Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer (2014), and The Rust Maidens by Gwendolyn Kiste (2018).--Becky Spratford Copyright 2019 Booklist