Onion is snatched.
Which is proper shit because she still had nearly twenty quid left on her Angry Slut Teen Clothing gift card and now she was never going to get those flamingo-pink leather chaps she'd been eyeing up. She wakes up chained to an armpit of a river city, earmarked for a skin-trader called The Toymaker. Surrounded by a creeping rot she has just three days to escape before the sold sticker becomes a brand. Forced into a knife fight with a world that has just pulled an AK47 on her, all Onion has to fight with is; a sewer for a mouth, a rusted up moral compass and a spanking anger that can sucker-punch kindness at twenty paces. She might survive but probably not. Sour Fruit is a dark dystopian novel set in northern Britain, in a river city called Kingston; a rotting scrap yard of misery. The VOIDs are forced to live there not by walls or fences but by being invisible in the new digital world. The novel explores ideas about what is home, how friendship can come from strange places and the debts we can't ever pay back.
Sour Fruit by Eli Allison is published by Unbound on 16 August 2018. As part of the #RandomThingsTours Blog Tour I'm delighted to welcome the author here to Random Things today.
She's talking about the books that are special to her in My Life In Books.
My Life in Books - Eli Allison
Dune by Frank Herbert
The scope, the world building, the twisted characters, what’s not to love and obsess over? It's hard controlling the desperate need for David Benioff and D. B. Weiss to make it into a beeping TV series already.
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
It’s a non-fiction book looking at the case for God, by the title you can probably tell his conclusion. Before I encountered this piece of work, I was swerving around the edges of my life, but when I read the last word on the last page and closed the book, I felt an overwhelming sense of focused calm. From that moment forward I knew I had to embrace... well everything, because this is it. No run-throughs, no second chances. One life. I signed up for an OU creative writing class, that very week.
The Broken Earth series, by N. K. Jemisin
A Book Club suggestion that was a refreshing and unique look at the future. Dystopias are sort of my bread and butter, but this series made me think differently about the future and how to write about it.
Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
The book its self is almost too dark and horrific even for me, but the use of slang, called Nadsat was something that fascinated me. That you could create a language that your reader wouldn't know but could quickly get the gist of, was to my mind a very clever trick. One I was desperate to learn myself.
Good Omens by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman
Bury myself into this as a greasy teen; I'd never read anything that made me laugh out loud quite as much as this book did. Also if I ever get a pet dog, I will absolutely be naming the poor creature, Dog.
The Colour Purple by Alice Walker
I first read this book in my mid-teens, the skill with which Walker weaves a plot narrative from letters alone was something I'd never encountered before, and I was mesmerised by it, so much so I read the whole book in one sitting.
Saga by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples
An impulse buy. My daughter loves comics, and as we were wandering the land of the geek, the cover drew my attention. I picked it up and flicked to the first page where the main character is giving birth and swearing her arse off. I was hooked. My first but not last graphic novel.
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
A fascinating book that I bored every friend and random strangers on buses with for months. Makes you realise that humans aren't quite the logical creatures we pretend to be.
The Flavour Thesaurus by Niki Segnit
Strange to have a cookbook on a list like this perhaps, but fantasy cooking, where you snuggle up, a cup of tea in hand with a gorgeous cookbook, is a pleasure most delicious. I couldn't leave my favourite cookbook off a list like this.
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
You think it's a war book, but really it's a satire about bureaucracy. An immensely astute book, which wades into themes of the loss of religious faith, language's weakness when faced with the horrors humans inflict on each other, and of course Catch-22. I feel like a-right-clever-clogs whenever I crack it open, which is often because I bloody love it.
Eli Allison - August 2018
Eli Allison tells people at parties that she's a writer, but she
mostly spends the day in her knickers swearing at the laptop. She has never
written anything of any fame except for a jarringly bad poem which was read out
loud at her secondary school assembly (the highlight of everyone else’s school
year, predictably not her own). She gave up poetry and switched to the hard
stuff soon after. Writing stories about crushed dreams and balding men
looking for love that you could buy by the hour. Those were her happier ones.
She ping-ponged between one depressing job after another until her husband
said, ‘take a year and write your book’. Years later the book is done…There is
a sneaking suspicion he would have kept quiet had he known quite how long it
would have taken her.
She lives in Yorkshire, works in her head and does not enjoy long
walks on the beach or anywhere, in fact she gets upset at having to walk to the
fridge for cheese. She suffers badly from cheese sweats but endures.
Website:
http://www.eli-allison.com/
Twitter:
@EliAllison3
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