Wednesday 28 February 2018

Book of the Month for February - Paradise Girl by Phill Featherstone


Paradise Girl

has RECEIVED 


Book of the Month Award
for
February


A highly infectious and incurable virus spreads worldwide. Seventeen-year-old Kerryl Shaw and her family live on a remote farm and think they will be safe, but the plague advances. Despite deaths around them, the Shaws survive. However, this changes when a stranger arrives, and it soon becomes apparent he has brought the infection to their door. One by one the family succumbs, leaving Kerryl alone.

Kerryl is sure it’s only a matter of time before she, too, dies. She decides to record what she thinks will be her final days in a diary. She realises that it will never be read, so she imagines a reader and calls him Adam. As loneliness and isolation affect the balance of her mind, Adam ceases to be an imaginary character and becomes real to her.

Communications break down and services fail. Unexplained events build fear and menace: Kerryl hears her name called in the night; she’s attacked by stray animals; she’s molested when she visits the town; she sees a stranger outside her house, who vanishes when she tries to make contact; objects appear and disappear. The climax comes when she finds a text message on her phone. Who is texting her? How? She thinks it can only be Adam, because by now there is no one else left. Another text invites her to a rendezvous at the Bride Stones, a beauty spot popular with lovers, and she leaves for what she is sure will be a meeting with Adam...

“This is such an engrossing read I found it impossible to put down...This is writing of a high literary standard, with the kind of psychological depth which lingers in the mind long after reading.”
– Sarah Vincent, critic and author of The Testament of Vida Tremayne.


Genre: Dystopian
Approx Pages: 329





All books receiving a Book of the Month Award are automatically considered for Book of the Year 2018

All books receiving a Chill with a Readers' Award in March will automatically be considered for Book of the Month – March.





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