Widowland by C. J. Carey is the choice for this month’s Church Times Book Club — and on the podcast this week, Sarah Meyrick interviews the author, Jane Thynne (who wrote the book under the pen name C.J. Carey).

The book was suggested by the Revd Richard Lamey, who has written this month’s Church Times Book Club essay about it.

This is the third Book Club podcast, a monthly series launched recently in association with the Church Times Festival of Faith and Literature.

Widowland is published by Quercus at £8.99 (Church Times Bookshop £8.09); 978-1-5294-1200-0.

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About Widowland: The Coronation is approaching, but it is 1953 in an alternative universe, and Princess Elizabeth won’t be taking the throne. Widowland imagines a world in which Britain made peace with Germany in 1940.

Under this new alliance, many of the men have been sent to the continent, or disappeared. As women now greatly outnumber men, they are categorised, when they reach 18, into a range of roles which shape everything about their future. Women over 50, and those too old to give birth, become marginalised and fall into the bottom rung of society. They live in a ghetto, Widowland. Outbreaks of insurgency emerge, and the Ministry of Culture gives the heroine, Rose, the task of infiltrating Widowland to find the source of this uprising. Will she carry out her instructions and betray the women?

Picture credit: © Charles Kerr

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