Championed by Margaret Atwood (‘creepily prescient’), Emily St. John Mandel (‘a masterpiece’), Edna O’Brien (‘an enchantress’) and Eimear McBride (‘lush, hypnotic, compulsive’), Faber’s new edition of this lost 1977 classic is introduced by Carmen Maria Machado – and we are so excited to share it with a new generation of readers.
They paints a nightmarish portrait of Britain. THEY begin with a dead dog, shadowy footsteps, confiscated books. Soon the National Gallery is purged; eerie towers survey the coast; mobs stalk the countryside destroying artworks, and those who resist. THEY capture dissidents – writers, painters, musicians, even the unmarried and childless – in military sweeps, ‘curing’ these subversives of identity. Survivors gather together as cultural refugees, preserving their crafts, creating, loving and remembering. But THEY make it easier to forget . . .
This online book club is a unique opportunity to discuss this month’s Book Club questions on this provocative novel with Ella Griffiths, Faber Classics Editor, and Candida Lacey, one of Kay Dick’s three literary executors.
Candida Lacey is one of Kay Dick’s three literary executors. She has been a commissioning editor since the mid-1980s, when she first met Kay, working for Routledge, Pandora Press, Unwin Hyman, HarperCollins, Jonathan Cape and latterly at Myriad Editions where she was publishing director for 20 years.
Ella Griffiths is an editor overseeing Faber’s classics, archive and heritage lists.
Image credit: Helen Craig
Our online events take place via Zoom and last up to one hour.
- You will be emailed the link for the event the day before the event. If you haven’t received it by the morning of the event, please forward your confirmation email to members@faber.co.uk.
- You can email your questions in in advance to members@faber.co.uk or ask them via the Chat function on the night, although we are unable to guarantee which questions, if any, will be covered due to time constraints.
- When you have registered, you will receive email confirmation along with a promotional code to use on our website to receive £2 off They.
Kay Dick was a novelist, writer and editor. Born in London in 1915, she worked at Foyles bookshop before becoming the first female director of an English publishing house aged 26, editing authors such as George Orwell. She later reviewed for the New Statesman, Times, Spectator and Punch, as well as editing The Windmill under a pseudonym. Dick wrote five novels, including They (1977), which won the South-East Arts Literature Prize but swiftly went out of print, until it was recently rediscovered.
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The ‘creepily prescient’ (Margaret Atwood) dystopian ‘masterpiece’ (Emily St. John Mandel), lost for forty years: in a nightmarish Britain, THEY are coming closer…