They

By: Kay Dick

Narrated by: Isabel Adomakoh-Young

“A masterwork of English pastoral horror.” —Claire-Louise Bennett
“Creepily prescient . . . Insidiously horrifying!” —Margaret Atwood (via Twitter)
“I'm pretty wild about this paranoid, terrifying 1977 masterpiece.” —Lauren Groff
“Lush, strange, hypnotic, compulsive.” —Eimear McBride
"Crystalline . . . The signature of an enchantress." —Edna O’Brien
"A masterpiece of creeping dread." —Emily St John Mandel

Kay Dick's radical dystopian masterpiece, lost for forty years—with an introduction by Carmen Maria Machado.

Published to some acclaim in 1977 but swiftly forgotten, Kay Dick's They follows a nameless, genderless narrator living along the lush but decimated English coast, where a loose cohort of cultural refugees live meditative, artistic, often polyamorous lives. But this rustic tranquility is punctuated by bursts of menace as they must continually flee a faceless oppressor, an organization known only as “They,” whose supporters range the countryside destroying art and culture and brutalizing those who resist the purge. As the menacing “They” creep ever closer, a loosely connected band of dissidents attempt to evade the chilling mobs, but it’s only a matter of time until their luck runs out.
An electrifying literary artefact—a lost dystopian masterpiece and overlooked queer classic—They is an uncanny and prescient vision of a world hostile to beauty, emotion, and the individual.

©1977 Kay Dick (P)2021 Knopf Canada

Critic reviews

"A creepily prescient tale in which anonymous mobs target artists and destroy their art for the crime of individual vision. Insidiously horrifying!” —Margaret Atwood (via Twitter)

“A masterpiece of creeping dread.” —Emily St John Mandel

“Lush, strange, hypnotic, compulsive: a scintillating reminder of where groupthink leads and the courage required to hold out.” —Eimear McBride