Blue Ticket

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'

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'

Strange and luminous, spare and precise... A thrilling 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'

Both claustrophobic and expansive, dream-like and heart-stoppingly tense. You will want to languish in its world for a very long time

Lara Williams, author of 'Supper Club'

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'

Chilling, haunting, heartbreaking... Mackintosh brings a new sense of pathos to the dystopian novel... A moving and original meditation on freedom, fate, and women's rage

Kirkus, Starred Review

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'

A must for Handmaid's Tale aficionados

Booklist

Told with ragged prose that catches the breath, [Blue Ticket] articulates the irrepressible desires and wounds that can lie deep within, 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

Irish News

A darkly brilliant allegory... Astute, revelatory and heartbreaking

Heather O’Neill, author of 'The Lonely Hearts Hotel'

Even more hallucinatory and spiralled than her first [novel]... Terrifying and enchanting in equal measure

Lit Hub, Best New Books to Read This Summer

Powerful, Ishiguro-esque... Sophie 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

Boston Globe

Mesmerising

Daily Nerd

A dark fable... Mackintosh sensitively conveys resonant questions about motherhood, female solidarity, queer love, and bodily autonomy

New Yorker

Chilling, timely, thought-provoking

Esquire, Best Books of Summer 2020

Dreamlike, tense, compelling... Blue Ticket adds something new to the dystopian tradition set by Orwell's 1984 or Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale... Piercing moments of wisdom and insight drive toward a pitch-perfect ending

The New York Times

Mackintosh poses urgent questions about social expectations and free will that are relevant to all realities

Poets and Writers

Cool, disturbing, it deals with emotionally fraught material. Mackintosh traffics in ambivalence and ambiguity... What Calla really wants, the author shows us, isn't necessarily a baby; it's an answer

Washington Post

One of the most disquieting novels I've read in a long time, Blue Ticket will worms its way under your skin and haunt your dreams

Red, 'Best Books of August'

For anyone currently waiting with bated breath for the new season of 'The Handmaid's Tale', Booker-longlisted author Sophie Mackintosh's new novel is a feminist dystopia to quench your thirst

Evening Standard

A thoughtful and haunting exploration of freedom, fate and a woman's right to choose her destiny

Observer

A dreamlike exploration of free will and desire

Monocle

Visceral, primal, striking... This is a potent exploration of biology and agency, motherhood and childlessness, which confirms [Mackintosh] as a writer of note

Daily Mail

A compelling, unsettling tale... Part-horror, part thriller, and part pregnant-lesbian love story

i

Blue Ticket offers a completely different angle on a familiar subject... Like all good speculative fiction, [it] reminds us of a truth in the real world

New Humanist

Gripping, ethereal, atmospheric... Mackintosh handles haziness deliberately and with poise, demonstrating the near impossibility of trying to articulate or rationalise maternal desire

Sunday Times

Mackintosh is part of a new generation of female writers creating feminist fictions that relate uncannily to our dystopian times... [Her] fiction lives, to an unusual extent, in its musicality, in the rhythm and spareness of its sentences

Claire Armitstead, Guardian Review

Definitely don't miss the return of Sophie Mackintosh... Blue Ticket gets to the root of women's ambivalence and confusion around becoming mothers set against an unsettling dystopia; she's amazing

Stylist, Best Autumn Reads 2020

A spare, haunting tale of autonomy and free will

Anthony Cummins, Daily Mail

[Mackintosh] writes with an ethereal lyricism that is equally capable of fragility and violence

Spectator

Mackintosh writes with a language drawn from the body.... Impressionistic and haunting in equal measure

Annabel Nugent, Independent

The Handmaid's Tale as told by David Lynch... A bona fide chase narrative as well as a polyvalent, dream-like allegory of pregnancy and bodily change - not to mention the vortex of judgement that surrounds womanhood... Mackintosh is part of an exciting generation of writers, including Daisy Johnson and Julia Armfield... Blue Ticket stands apart from the crowd

Anthony Cummins, iNews