Perfidious Albion - Sam Byers

Welcome to Edmundsbury, a small town in England, some time in the recent future.

Brexit has happened and is real. Fear and loathing are on the rise. Grass-roots right-wing political party England Always are fomenting hatred. The residents of a failing housing estate are being cleared from their homes. A multinational tech company is making inroads into the infrastructure. Just as the climate seems at its most pressured, masked men begin a series of 'disruptions', threatening to make internet histories public, asking the townspeople what don't you want to share? As tensions mount, lives begin to unravel.

Jess Ellis's research into internet misogyny pushes her relationship with her over-exposed opinion columnist boyfriend Robert Townsend to breaking point. Robert's championing of the inhabitants of the threatened estate begins to erode the edges of his fragile idealism. Local England Always politician Hugo Bennington finds his twisted loyalties catching up with him. At the nearby tech park, behind the utopian rhetoric, Trina James finds that something is dangerously amiss.

A controversial tweet; a series of ill-judged thinkpieces; a riot of opinions. Suddenly Edmundsbury is no longer the peaceful town it has always imagined itself to be. Things are changing. No-one is quite who they appear. The future has arrived, and it is not what anyone imagined.

Smart, satirical and honed to frightening acuity, Sam Byers’s writing offers up a black mirror to Britain post-Brexit in this frighteningly believable and knowingly off-kilter state-of-the nation novel. As the Guardian writes, this is ‘both a rollicking farce of political exhaustion and social collapse, and a subtle investigation into the slippery, ever-evolving relationship between words and deeds’. From the invasion of every aspect of home and business by global tech giants to the drip-feed of social media clock-bait newsfeeds, Byer’s taps into the greatest fears of a country - a world - in free-fall and the personal relationships carried along in its wake. The result is shocking, enthralling and unexpectedly, riotously good fun.