Leaving England

Sometime around now an unnamed virus has laid London and its people to waste. No one knows what the government is doing or where they are. 'Cleaners' raid homes; neighbours spy, animals are feral, old people are saying goodbye on the ends of phones about to go dead. The internet is down.

Liz's husband has gone missing. But that's not new. She decides to flee the city and head for safer ground - Wales, her childhood home.

She packs her infant daughter and some rudimentary supplies into a car that has a tank of petrol she knows not if she can refill, and dashes to collect her teenage son, the redoubtable Ben from school. But Ben is cloistered, locked down. She cannot reach him.

So begins the remarkable journey of a naive mother, an unwitting refugee and mistrusted incomer, and the odyssey of her son, Ben, who walks to be reunited with her, his sister and he hopes, his father.

Written by the author a few years ago - how could it happen today?

Leaving England is not simply a disaster novel, as prescient as it is: it explores ideas of the family - how that may or may not have changed - the fracturing of identity and belonging where one once unquestioningly belonged to a whole, safety -  and the disruption, threat and need for survival that notion entails. It manages to be at once a mystery, a horror, a dystopia, and a new utopia. And fear not - it's uplifting!

Leaving England is Orlanda Marsden's first novel. As such it complies with its publisher's mission  - to launch new voices and stories.