Published: 22 March 2019 at 10:43
High-profile praise for The Migration, by Anglia Ruskin Lecturer Dr Helen Marshall
Dr Helen Marshall’s debut novel The Migration, which is set in a Britain ravaged by storms, flooding and a mysterious disease, will be officially launched in Cambridge on Tuesday, 2 April.
Helen is the Director of the Centre for Science Fiction & Fantasy at Anglia Ruskin University, as well as the Course Leader for the MA in Science Fiction & Fantasy, and her work has already received a string of impressive plaudits.
Author Neil Gaiman said that “Helen Marshall is a writer who creates real people in real situations, then uses the fantastic to pry her way inside her readers’ ribcages and break us wide open”, while The Guardian’s review said that The Migration “fulfils her early promise in a moving study of love, family bonds, climate change and personal transformation”.
The National Post newspaper, in her native Canada, said that “Marshall is a master at bizarre, myth-infused scenarios that play on a reader's subconscious in ways creepy and oddly pleasurable”, while M.R. Carey, author of The Girl With All the Gifts, described The Migration as “A dark fable that somehow feels both timeless and urgently topical”.
The Migration draws on the subjects of climate change, a strange immune disorder and a young woman’s dawning awareness of mortality and being left alone, the latter triggered by an incident when Helen was in her final year of High School in Canada. Her father suffered a serious head injury in a car accident, which affected his short term memory. Her mother was abroad at the time and Helen was alone with her younger sister.
Helen explained:
The Migration is published by Titan Books in the UK and Penguin Random House in Canada. Helen will be speaking alongside Irish novelist Sarah Maria Griffin at Waterstones bookshop in Cambridge on Tuesday, 2 April (6pm-7.30pm). Tickets are available from the Waterstones website.