The Marches

The clock starts when they flag your child.

Part of The Wardenry — Book 1

In a near-future England remade as a theocratic 'Recovery' and sealed behind a hard border from a free Scotland, some families are the wrong sort — watched, restricted, running out of room. The Mackays are one of them. When eight-year-old Beth is flagged 'recoverable,' the clock starts.

For months Catriona Mackay has been preparing one desperate thing: a winter crossing of the firth to the free north, on the single night the border watch is thin. The Marches is the story of that crossing — a family's love measured against a state that has decided their child would be better off as someone else's — and of what it costs at the water's edge.

The Marches is the opening novel of the Wardenry, C.M. Swinney's literary dystopia of a broken Britain, for readers of The Handmaid's Tale, Never Let Me Go, and Prophet Song. The trilogy is complete.

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