The Curfew

Think The Handmaid's Tale but with the women in charge, set in a world where all men are electronically tagged and placed under strict curfew, and the murder investigation threatening to undo it all. Imagine a near-future Britain in which women dominate workplaces, public spaces, and government. Where the gender pay gap no longer exists and motherhood opens doors instead of closing them. Where women are no longer afraid to walk home alone, to cross a dark parking lot, or to catch the last train. Where all men are electronically tagged and not allowed out after 7 p.m. But the curfew hasn’t made life easy for all women. Sarah is a single mother who happily rebuilt her life after her husband, Greg, was sent to prison for breaking curfew. Now he’s about to be released, and Sarah isn’t expecting a happy reunion, given that she’s the reason he was sent there. Her teenage daughter, Cass, hates living in a world that restricts boys like her best friend, Billy. Billy would never hurt anyone, and she’s determined to prove it. Somehow. Helen is a teacher at the local school. Secretly desperate for a baby, she’s applied for a cohab certificate with her boyfriend, Tom, and is terrified that they won’t get it. The last thing she wants is to have a baby on her own. These women don’t know it yet, but one of them is about to be violently murdered. Evidence will suggest that she died late at night and that she knew her attacker. It couldn’t have been a man because a CURFEW tag is a solid alibi. Isn’t it?

William and Molly lead a life of small pleasures, riddles at the kitchen table, and games of string and orange peels. All around them a city rages with war. When the uprising began, William’s wife was taken, leaving him alone with their young daughter. They keep their heads down and try to remain unnoticed as police patrol the streets, enforcing a curfew and arresting citizens. But when an old friend seeks William out, claiming to know what happened to his wife, William must risk everything. He ventures out after dark, and young Molly is left to play, reconstructing his dangerous voyage, his past, and their future. An astounding portrait of fierce love within a world of random violence, The Curfew is a mesmerizing feat of literary imagination.

Curfew takes place during one twenty-four hour period in January 1985. Matilde Neruda, widow of the Nobel Prize-winning poet, has just passed away, and various factions are rallying to turn the event to their advantage: for Pinochet's junta, it represents a chance to assert political authority, while for the intellectuals who had basked in the Nerudas' light, it is an opportunity to grab the spoils of the estate. Against this backdrop of complex, often conflicting motivations, Donoso weaves a portrait of a society struggling to fashion a daily existence for itself, and of an intelligentsia vainly attempting to salvage the remnants of glory days long gone by. But Curfew is also a story of the tragic love between Judit Torre, an upper-middle-class radical who wants to escape her bitter past; and Mañntilde;ungo Vera, a native son returning after a successful career as a European pop singer. In the zone between documentary-like realism and grotesque absurdity, Joséeacute; Donoso evokes the suffocating atmosphere of a country under dictatorship, and its quietly devastating effect on the actions of those who live there.

To enter the world of Ben Okri's stories is to surrender to a new reality. Set in the chaotic streets of Lagos and the jungle heart of Nigeria, all the laws of cause and effect, fact and fiction, are suspended. It is a world where the lives of the powerless veer terrifyingly close to nightmare. In rich, lyrical, almost hallucinatory prose Ben Okri guides us through the fabulous and the mundane, the serene and the randomly violent. The unrelenting Nigerian heat and the implacable darkness of the black-out and the military curfew are the backdrops for his characters each finding their own ways to survive. We witness their dogged resistance to impotence, their unquenchable humour and their insistence on the possibility of love in the face of terror. Written with the lucid clarity and logic of dream, Stars of the New Curfew is a book of visionary imagination.