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  • Published: 18 February 2027
  • ISBN: 9781529938739
  • Imprint: Transworld Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240

This Machine Feeds




Somewhere between Black Mirror and Patricia Lockwood, and from ‘One of the most important new voices in fiction’ Alan Moore, author of Watchmen, This Machine Feeds is a novel about the cost of living in the end times.

‘One of the most important new voices in fiction’ Alan Moore, author of Watchmen

Heather is an artist of middling talent with a flawless instinct for self-promotion.

Finally given her big shot, she prepares a new work about the world we live in – a world of technology, violence, power and accelerating absurdity. But as she stares into the abyss of the now, her friends begin to worry. Is Heather making her masterpiece, or is she losing her mind?

Around her, reality bleeds into nightmare. A woman is trapped inside her home by the terms of her rental contract. America reenacts the assassination of JFK. A father and daughter, unknown to one another, collaborate on the building of a chatbot.

Heather is trying to make sense of it all.

Darkly comic and ferociously alive, This Machine Feeds is about what happens when the world becomes too deranged to comprehend – and whether anyone can truly escape with their sanity.

  • Published: 18 February 2027
  • ISBN: 9781529938739
  • Imprint: Transworld Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240

About the author

Heather Parry

Heather Parry is a writer of fiction and non-fiction. Her books have been long- and shortlisted for the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year award, the Polari First Book Prize and the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing. In 2025 The Skinny named her as one of the ‘Next Generation of Scottish Writers’. She writes the Substack general observations on eggs, and lives in Glasgow with her partner and their cats, Fidel and Ernesto.

Also by Heather Parry

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Praise for This Machine Feeds

This Machine Feeds is a reminder that fiction, at its best, can render the world such that it can be properly seen – in all of its deranging horror and terrifying possibilities. A work of serious political and ethical range that captures the vertiginous, unnerving feeling that comes with being alive now – forced to bear witness to the unholy end-times alliance of messianic militarism, rapacious necrocapitalism and technofascist idiocy. (It’s also quite a fun book).

Keiran Goddard, author of I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning

Shockingly good, in the way the world decayed and spread its roots throughout the ephemeral and ethereal.

Misha Honcharenko, author of Trap Unfolds Me Greedily

In This Machine Feeds, Heather Parry has created both a mirror to the world we live in and a window into the future that is fast on its way here. With her brilliant prose and envious handle of tone, Parry asks: What exactly is wrong with humanity? And the answer seems to be: Everything. Incisive, probing, acidic.

Kasim Ali, author of Good Intentions

I loved Heather’s dazzling This Machine Feeds. Utterly original, tremendously thought-provoking and full of mischief. I was put in mind of Kurt Vonnegut at his most daring, brought bang up to date.

Sean Lusk, author of No Place for Us

This Machine Feeds is everything I've come to expect from Heather Parry: dark and twisty, occasionally twisted, irreverent and unrelentingly playful. It’s peppered with characters and scenarios so unlike anything I've read before that they're now hanging out rent-free in my brain. Heather Parry has an uncanny talent for peeling the lid off society to reveal the sinister mechanisms beneath. An important voice we should all be listening to.

Jan Carson, author of The Raptures

A ferocious critique of a culture stagnating in the wake of unbridled technological advancement – This Machine Feeds is incisive, sickening and darkly comic. Parry reasserts the importance of art at a time when we seem to be forgetting it.

Callum McSorley, author of Squeaky Clean

Heather Parry is innovating a new fiction for the twenty-first century. This Machine Feeds explores the nebulous connections between tech, power, politics and art with virtuoso ease. An existentially necessary read for our times.

Gab Torr, author of Hard Place

How does Heather Parry make the intellectual so visceral? I am in awe. We may be hurtling towards a corrupted future, but This Machine Feeds is a timely reminder that it takes a human to make art this alive. Equal parts nightmarish and necessary, I came away wanting to change the world.

Jane Flett, author of Welcome to the Chaoskampf

Perfect for fans of Black Mirror, This Machine Feeds presents an all-too-real future, where technology deceives and controls us, reminding readers there is no truth without art. Parry remains a surprising and eclectic talent.

Amy Twigg, author of Spoilt Creatures

Brilliantly cutting and delightfully terrifying. This Machine Feeds is an incisive and sardonic takedown of the entanglement between humans, technology and power.

Elle Nash, author of Animals Eat Each Other