From Booker and Orange Prize-nominated author Sarah Hall comes the tale of an imaginary England, a future dystopian society where the right to bear a child is determined by a state lottery system.

In this stunning novel Sarah Hall draws on the work of Margaret Atwood and George Orwell to imagine a dystopic England where terrifying new systems of control are in place and reproduction has become a lottery. When a girl known only as "Sister" escapes the confines of her increasingly repressive marriage to find an isolated group of women living on a remote northern farm, she must find out whether she has it in herself to become an active insurgent.

This fascinating novel considers what lengths women will go to in a brutalized world in order to resist their oppressors, what tactics they must employ to survive and remain free. But the story asks a wider and more difficult question: under what circumstances might an ordinary person become a terrorist?