Blue Ticket: A Novel

RECOMMENDED READING FROM THE TORONTO STAR, ELLE, GOOD HOUSEKEEPING, FIVE BOOKS, POPSUGAR, BUSTLE, OPRAH MAGAZINE, ESQUIRE, AND THE GUARDIANVOTED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR BY LIT HUB “Blue Ticket is a darkly brilliant allegory…. The protagonist is such a lovely rebel, whose inner thoughts on having a female body are astute, revelatory and heartbreaking. A beautiful read.” —Heather O’Neill, author of The Lonely Hearts Hotel “In this dark fable, Mackintosh explores the strictures inhibiting a woman’s right to choose … [and] sensitively conveys resonant questions about motherhood, female solidarity, queer love, and bodily autonomy.” —The New Yorker "[Mackintosh's] writing is clear and sharp, with piercing moments of wisdom and insight that drive toward a pitch-perfect ending … Blue Ticket adds something new to the dystopian tradition set by Orwell's 1984 or Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale." —New York Times Book Review“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 and The Man Who Saw Everything “Mackintosh’s second novel is even more hallucinatory and spiraled than her first…. Terrifying and enchanting in equal measure.” —Lit Hub “Expect [Blue Ticket] to top every reading list—and to start impassioned conversations.” —Vogue (UK)“[A] thrilling account of what it means to be a woman.” —The Irish Times “A rich, sharp, and daring book. To read Blue Ticket is to feel so vigorously alert you can feel the world turning.” —Heidi Sopinka, author of The Dictionary of Animal Languages “Utterly exquisite—clever and brilliant and heartbreaking. From the dusty road to the salving forest, I absolutely adored it.” —Emma Jane Unsworth, author of Adults and Animals  “Strange and luminous, beautifully spare and precise: Sophie Mackintosh constructs her disturbing premise with such skill that I found myself forgetting that the world of Blue Ticket is not (quite) our own. A thrilling and nuanced 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. Lushly textured and stunningly written, you will want to languish in its world for a very long time.” —Lara Williams, author of Supper Club “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 “Mackintosh renders Calla’s internal struggle with deft, lyric precision … [and] brings a new sense of pathos to the dystopian novel…. A heartbreaking bid for self-determination, self-worth, and self-knowledge—no matter the cost. A moving and original meditation on freedom, fate, and women’s rage.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)“In her thought-provoking novel about fate, control, and biology, Mackintosh keeps the reader turning pages as Calla’s due date approaches. A must for Handmaid’s Tale aficionados.” —Booklist (starred review)“Mackintosh’s haunting, dystopian tale explores the emotional fallout of forced birth control in a near-future society…. [A] tense, visionary drama.” —Publishers Weekly“From the powerful imagination behind The Water Cure comes a Handmaid’s Tale-esque dip into the fraught choice of motherhood.” —ELLE “Told with ragged prose that catches the breath, Calla’s journey articulates the irrepressible desires and wounds that can lie deep within, and is marked by a claustrophobia that never stops pressing in from the margins. This unsettling reimagining of the anxieties and pressures around motherhood lays bare the alienation that comes when your body is not truly yours.” —The Herald “Mackintosh lays bare many of the fears and realities that face any society’s women as they contemplate when their choices begin, and where they might end.” —The Boston Globe     “[C]hilling speculative fiction set in a feminist dystopia.… [Blue Ticket] wrestles with timely, thought-provoking questions of fate, free will, and bodily autonomy.” —Esquire“Mackintosh isn’t one to shy away from difficult, messy, daring interrogations of how women are seen—and treated—in so-called modern society.… Blue Ticket considers female pain, power dynamics, and how we define the true self in a way that sometimes makes the prose physically painful to read. Yet underneath the layers of toughness, a tenderness comes through—one that asks not to be judged; an understanding that resists being reductive.” —Hazlitt “[In Blue Ticket,] Mackintosh’s prose … [is] beautiful and otherworldly, violent and tender, reverberating into the darkness.” —The Guardian     “Like The Handmaid’s Tale, [Blue Ticket] deals with the politics of reproduction.… Characters [are] so fully written—thin-skinned and fleshy and all-feeling … while typical feminist dystopias gain much of their power from a riveting event-heavy plot, the most captivating moments in Mackintosh’s novels are almost always confined to the parameters of her narrator’s own flesh and bones.” —The Independent   “[S]trange and powerful … [Blue Ticket is] a little like The Handmaid’s Tale as told by David Lynch…. Blue Ticket stands apart from the crowd, not least for its anaesthetic style, straight out of a 1960s French-style anti-novel.” —The i (UK) “[A] thoughtful and haunting exploration of freedom, fate and a woman’s right to choose her destiny.” —The Observer   “Mackintosh has a particular gift for coolly articulating visceral primal instincts and shaping them into controlled, striking prose. This is a potent exploration of biology and agency, motherhood and childlessness, which confirms her as a writer of note.” —Daily Mail   “Blue Ticket has two modes, two paces. There’s reverie, in the elegant passages where Calla ruminates on motherhood. And there’s the thrill of the chase.… Both are expertly fashioned, and Mackintosh’s prose is relentlessly fine.” —The Sunday Telegraph   “[E]legant and sparse.” —New Statesman