The world went quiet to survive. Something under the city remembers why it should not have.

In 2148, feeling is a medical event. Regulators turn every emotion down to zero, the Stewards run the world without wanting anything, and a citizen who fails to report a neighbour's tears is presumed to have shed them too. Cherry Dalvin is good at her job: she catalogues stored human feeling and rounds it down to nothing.

Then a lullaby will not stay flattened.

Far below the Repository, the Source begins to sing. The dust that carried every feeling the world ever stored rises through the streets, the Choir of Dust wakes, and Cherry and her colleague Simon Drell find themselves carrying a memory far older than either of them. Above them, Minister Ivan Chalmer – architect of the Equilibrium Act, the man who signed the silencing – hears again the note he buried, and the order he gave to bury it.

The Choir of Dust is a standalone science-fiction novel of about 110,000 words in fourty-one chapters and three parts:

The Quiet – how a tidy, kind-sounding law took the feeling out of a world one convenience at a time, and the night it all came back.
nThe Choirfield – a planet that feels everything at once, and the quiet communities that choose not to.
nThe Unfinished – a new kind of life that insists on its flaws, and the people who have to learn to live beside it.

Braided through the main story is the household of the Minister himself: his sister Veda, who files every report within the hour; Edda, the laundress who hums where no one can hear; her daughter Neda; Tomas, who mends the pod lines at night; and the girl, Lupi-Lu, who grows up half a beat out of step with a perfectly tuned world. Their kitchens, laundrettes and arguments carry the book's heart.

If you enjoy:
n• Dystopian fiction where the villain is a good idea that went too far
n• Machines and minds learning to feel, without easy answers
n• Multi-generational stories that follow one family's guilt across decades
n• Lyrical, character-driven science fiction for book clubs
n• Endings that are hopeful without being tidy

This is a story about grief, complicity and the courage to stay in an argument. Nobody is forgiven too quickly, and nobody is beyond being heard.

'Perfection was silence. Life is the noise that finally broke it.'

The Choir of Dust

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