Signed
Afterland
Signed Cape Town first edition, 2020
Afterland by Lauren Beukes is a dystopian thriller set in a world reshaped by pandemic, published in 2020 and arriving into a world already grappling with one. In Beukes's imagined future, a virus known as the Manfall has killed ninety-nine percent of the global male population, and the story unfolds three years after the collapse. The narrative follows Cole as she breaks her twelve-year-old son Miles out of a Department for the Protection of Men quarantine facility where surviving males are sequestered as state property. Disguising him as her niece Mila, she flees across the country from California to Florida, hoping to smuggle him out of the United States to safety.
Along the way, Beukes depicts a society reorganized under female rule that is no less brutal or authoritarian than the one that preceded it. Similar in argument to The Power (2016) by Naomi Alderman, the novel suggests that power and oppression are functions of opportunity rather than gender. The government enforces a Reprohibition on unauthorized procreation, sperm is treated as white gold on the black market, and religious extremism flourishes in movements such as the Church of All Sorrows, whose followers preach that female sin brought about the Manfall. The result is a bleak post-pandemic landscape in which catastrophe has altered global demographics without fundamentally altering human behavior.
The true first edition was this trade paperback published by Umuzi in the author’s native South Africa, followed shortly by American and British hardcover editions, with no definitive priority between them.
Signed copy. Signed by Beukes on the title page.
Softcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, printed wrappers. Cape Town, South Africa: Umuzi, 2020. ISBN: 9781415210444. #11313.
Very good.
Along the way, Beukes depicts a society reorganized under female rule that is no less brutal or authoritarian than the one that preceded it. Similar in argument to The Power (2016) by Naomi Alderman, the novel suggests that power and oppression are functions of opportunity rather than gender. The government enforces a Reprohibition on unauthorized procreation, sperm is treated as white gold on the black market, and religious extremism flourishes in movements such as the Church of All Sorrows, whose followers preach that female sin brought about the Manfall. The result is a bleak post-pandemic landscape in which catastrophe has altered global demographics without fundamentally altering human behavior.
The true first edition was this trade paperback published by Umuzi in the author’s native South Africa, followed shortly by American and British hardcover editions, with no definitive priority between them.
Signed copy. Signed by Beukes on the title page.
Softcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, printed wrappers. Cape Town, South Africa: Umuzi, 2020. ISBN: 9781415210444. #11313.
Very good.
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