This is a story of resilience, transformation, and hope in tumultuous-even frightening-times. (Video: Ron Charles/The Washington Post) 'Red Clocks'.

In the vein of Margaret Atwood and Eileen Myles, Leni Zumas fearlessly explores the contours of female experience, evoking The Handmaid's Tale for a new millennium. All of the main characters in Leni Zumas's novel Red Clocks are women a school teacher, a student, wife and natural healer. Red Clocks is at once a riveting drama, whose mysteries unfold with magnetic energy, and a shattering novel of ideas. this near-future speculative fiction in an america that has passed a 'fetal personhood' amendment, outlawing both abortion and invitro fertilization, follows five different women dealing with the effects of such draconian patriarchal theocracy on their lives. Gin is the gifted, forest-dwelling herbalist, or 'mender,' who brings all their fates together when she's arrested and put on trial in a frenzied modern-day witch hunt.Mattie is the adopted daughter of doting parents and one of Ro's best students, who finds herself pregnant with nowhere to turn.Susan is a frustrated mother of two trapped in a crumbling marriage.Ro is a single high-school teacher, trying to have a baby on her own while also writing a biography of Eivor, a little-known 19th-century female polar explorer. At first glance, Red Clocks by Leni Zumas sounds like a futuristic, dystopian, science fiction thriller in the vein of Children of Men or The Handmaids.In a small Oregon fishing town, five very different women navigate these new barriers alongside age-old questions surrounding motherhood, identity, and freedom. In this ferociously imaginative novel, abortion is once again illegal in America, in-vitro fertilization is banned, and the Personhood Amendment grants rights of life, liberty, and property to every embryo.

Red clocks a novel