'Each morning, the last humans start their day with graphic footage from the front. This is what sustains them — literally. In a world where eight billion souls have perished, the survivors huddle together apart, perpetually at war, in the city-states of Rise and Shine. Yet this war, far from representing their doom, is their means of survival. For their leaders have found the key to life when crops, livestock, and the very future have been blighted — a key that turns on each citizen being moved by human suffering. The question is, with memories still bright of all the friends they’ve lost, all the experience they’ll never know, will compassion be enough? Or must they succumb to, or even embrace, darker desires?'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Epigraph:
'The world is so dreadful in many ways.
Do let us be tender with each other.'
-Katherine Mansfield,
letter to Dorothy Brett, 14 August 1918
'Patrick Allington conjures a bizarre world in which almost everyone on earth has perished.'
'The contemporary literary imagination more and more figures the future as a place where quality of life is worse than it is now. Environmental catastrophe, climate change and now pandemics feature in the scaffolding we use to predict what the world beyond us will be like.' (Introduction)
'Patrick Allington’s second novel, Rise & Shine, drops us headfirst into a future in the wake of an ecological catastrophe that claimed the lives of more than eight billion people. The survivors reside in the city-states of Rise and Shine, which are constantly at war with each other, and the bloody footage is broadcast to the populace’s “autoscreens” as the sole source of nourishment. These graphic images of human suffering keep the residents alive as they obsess over the gory details and the military heroes featured.' (Introduction)
'‘What is the use of saying, “Peace, Peace” when there is no peace below the diaphragm?’ asks Chinese writer Lin Yutang in The Importance of Living (1937). The subject of food and its manifestations – sustenance, communion, gluttony, longing – has claimed a place in the books of every era and genre, from heavenly manna in the Book of Exodus to starving gladiators in Suzanne Collins’s multi-billion-dollar The Hunger Games franchise. Writers as varied as Marcel Proust and Margaret Atwood have prioritised this theme in their work.' (Introduction)
'Patrick Allington’s second novel, Rise & Shine, drops us headfirst into a future in the wake of an ecological catastrophe that claimed the lives of more than eight billion people. The survivors reside in the city-states of Rise and Shine, which are constantly at war with each other, and the bloody footage is broadcast to the populace’s “autoscreens” as the sole source of nourishment. These graphic images of human suffering keep the residents alive as they obsess over the gory details and the military heroes featured.' (Introduction)
'The contemporary literary imagination more and more figures the future as a place where quality of life is worse than it is now. Environmental catastrophe, climate change and now pandemics feature in the scaffolding we use to predict what the world beyond us will be like.' (Introduction)
