What an astonishing book Feral Bloom is. This dystopian science fiction novel is written with a beautiful poetic cadence, that, I must admit, took a little getting used to, but it didn’t take too long, and once I hit the groove with the prose style, I went back and re-read the first couple of chapters to allow myself to almost inhale the atmosphere created in this vivid world.
The group of people in this story are barely surviving and functioning in this post-apocalyptic version of Britain, living on the coast, where the air and land is thick with toxicity. There are similarities with the bleakness of McCarthy’s The Road, but Feral Bloom is very much its own thing.
The sensory texture in this novel is among the best I have ever read. Rich word choices and sentence structure build out an immersive, tangible environment. The characterisation is rich, and the journey these people are required to undertake is compelling. The book is riddled with questions, and as a reader I was grasping at fleeting answers. The ending of the story takes a shift into something surprising and I was gripped till I got to the last page.
Feral Bloom is a journey to behold, and it’s a science-fiction tale of the highest order. Honestly, get a copy of this book and bump it right to the top of your TBR.