Jackie chooses a special elite band of soldiers, including Sister, and trains them even more brutally than any Special Forces might be trained today.

The south-east byre has no visible features, and the loft floor above is a replacement, and the north east byre retains a cobbled floor surface and C20 timber stalls.

Of course, these books had their beautiful passages, but they were part of the plot and went along with the plot. Home to William Golding, Sylvia Plath, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Max Porter, Ingrid Persaud, Anna Burns and Rachel Cusk, among many others, Faber is proud to publish some of the greatest novelists from the early twentieth century to today.

But as the story shifts from anxious flight to defiant confrontation and the narrative fractures into brief vignettes of the inevitable fall, hints of a future forged from stubborn resistance can be glimpsed through the gaps. A Handmaid's Tale for our times, this exhilarating novel pits political oppression against the will to survive, in a nightmarishly believable vision of Britain in the near future. A number of attractions are close by, including Haweswater Reservoir, which offers a variety of treks, and Keld Chapel, a National Trust property. But Jackie's single-minded vision for the army means that Sister must decide all over again what freedom is, and whether she is willing to fight for it.When the changes first came about, they were aligned in their views, and yet he has come to accept the status quo – something for which she can’t forgive him. In the light of a comment made by Hall towards the end of this interview, I would probably modify the comment about the framing device – the fact that the novel is supposedly a recovered but corrupted interrogation file (though as others have pointed out, it doesn’t read like that) implies something has happened in the wake of the events of the novel, but doesn’t necessarily imply what. The publication of The Carhullan Army is unnervingly well-timed: following a month of apocalyptic flooding, here is a dreadfully plausible and absorbing vision of a Britain whose unravelling begins with just that - a deluge of water . A sophisticated SF story, in the sense that the author is developing or challenging established SF ideas. I haven’t read many dystopian novels (I can’t remember reading any except ‘Matched’ by Allie Condie) and so it was interesting to read one.