It's a bit late to be wishing you all a happy new year, but I decided that, for me, last Monday, 13th, was New Year's Day, so Happy New Year everyone! The last couple of years have been difficult for me for various reasons but at the end of last year, moving into the beginning of this year, there was a family bereavement and everything that goes along with that. Other things remain unresolved, and these may prove difficult going forward but, having got the worst out of the way, I'm looking forward to this year with plans for good things.
So, that's where I've been and why the blog has been so quiet. But I'm back now, and hoping to improve things along the way. And I'm jumping back in with an absolutely brilliant book, one which I've been so excited about for so long. Welcome to my review of The Hope, the new book from Paul E Hardisty. Big thanks to Anne Cater for inviting me and to the publisher for my review copy. I will be buying my own paperback copy. The Hope comes out on 29th January.
The Blurb
The year is 2082. Climate collapse, famine and war have left the world in ruins. In the shadow of the Alpha-Omega regime – descendants of the super-rich architects of disaster – sixteenyear-old Boo Ashworth and her uncle risk everything to save what’s left of human knowledge, hiding the last surviving books in a secret library beneath the streets of Hobart.
But Boo has a secret of her own: an astonishing ability to memorise entire texts with perfect recall. When the library is discovered and destroyed, she’s forced to flee – armed with nothing but the stories she carries in her mind, and a growing understanding of her family’s true past.
Hunted and alone, and with the help of some unlikely allies, she must fight to save her loved ones – and bring hope to a broken world.
My Review
The Hope is the third book in Paul's climate-emergency thriller series The Forcing Trilogy, following The Forcing and The Descent. I have been looking forward to it since finishing The Descent, which described the chaos brought on the world by big business, greedy powerful individuals, ineffective or corrupt politicians - wars, famine, extreme weather, destruction of nature. This all started in an alternative 2024 that felt uncomfortably close to home.
It's now 2082 and our narrator for The Hope is 16 year old Becky, known as Boo, who lives with her uncle, aunt and cousin in what is left of Hobart, Tasmania. There are also other members of her extended family involved in the story. The family scavenge for food and Aunt Julie is sick, dying, and there isn't enough, or the right, medication to save her. Aside for caring for Julie, Boo helps her uncle categorise the books in their library, books saved from destruction by the Alpha-Omega regime - the descendants of powerful, corrupt business people and politicians who took all that they wanted, the more the better - who don't want people to read about what life used to be like before the world was destroyed. Tasmania is essentially ruled by one such descendent, the Valliant Junior, as he holds all the power, all the medicines, etc, and has an army of men and women and drones to do his bidding. During Boo's adventures she crosses paths with this young man, as she comes to realise that she has a key role to play in bringing hope back to a broken world.
I love Boo. She's scared and vulnerable, and we see that. But she's brave, so brave, in the face of some horrible stuff. And she is remarkable, as she can recall every page she's ever read. Ever. In some cases, she just absorbs the words, then 'reads' them later in her head. And it's this skill which has brought her understanding about her family and her place in the world, and her greatest asset for what she must do.
In my review of The Forcing back in 2023, I called it a 'book for our time'. I felt the same about The Descent and I feel the same about The Hope. Now even more so, in a world of wars, attempted hostile takeovers, megalomaniac presidents wanting what's not theirs to have, and major powers ignoring the ongoing climate crisis. Some of this book might seem far fetched to some, but I don't think so. Paul Hardisty knows what he's talking about after spending years involved in environmental science. As an aside, if you get chance to hear him speak, please do, he's fascinating. I was lucky enough to hear him at the fabulous Book Nook in Stewarton and I think the whole audience would happily have listened to him all night - an hour just wasn't long enough! But back to the book - The Hope is where we could be if we don't act soon to save our world, and, by we, I mean especially our leaders, but we can all do our bit. But it also reminds us that, however bad things gets, there is always hope.
The Author
Canadian Paul Hardisty has spent twenty-five years working all over the world as an environmental scientist and freelance journalist. He has roughnecked on oil rigs in Texas, explored for gold in the Arctic, mapped geology in Eastern Turkey (where he was befriended by PKK rebels), and rehabilitated water wells in the wilds of Africa. He was in Ethiopia in 1991 as the Mengistu regime fell, survived a bomb blast in a café in Sana’a in 1993, and was one of the last Westerners out of Yemen at the outbreak of the 1994 civil war. In 2022 he criss-crossed Ukraine reporting on the Russian invasion. His debut thriller The Abrupt Physics of Dying was shortlisted for the CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger and was a Telegraph Thriller of the Year, and The Forcing (2023) and The Descent (2024) were a SciFi Now Book of the Month and shortlisted for the Crime Fiction Lover Awards. Paul is a keen outdoorsman, a conservation volunteer, and lives in Western Australia.
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