Paperchain Book Event: The Forcing
Paul E Hardisty
5pm, Wednesday 20 March
Paperchain Bookstore
34 Franklin Street Manuka, Griffith, 2603
‘In the near future, civilisation is collapsing. Frustrated and angry after years of denial and inaction, in a last-ditch attempt to stave off disaster, a government of youth has taken power in North America. As retribution, and to pay for the mounting costs of dealing with the simultaneous scourges of war, famine and ecological collapse, a policy of institutionalised ageism has been introduced. All those older than the prescribed age are deemed responsible, and are to be “relocated”, their property and assets confiscated.
David Ashworth, known by his friends and students as Teacher, and his wife May, find themselves among the thousands being forced to move to “new accommodation” in the abandoned southern deserts - thrown together with a wealthy industrialist and his wife, a high court lawyer, two recent immigrants to America and a hospital worker. Together, they must come to terms with their new lives in a land rendered unrecognisable.
As the terrible truth of their situation is revealed, lured by rumours of a tropical sanctuary where they can live in peace, they plan a perilous escape. But the world outside is more dangerous than they would ever have imagined. And for those who survive, nothing will ever be the same again…
Canadian Paul Hardisty has spent twenty-five years working all over the world as an environmental scientist and freelance journalist. He has rough-necked on oil rigs in Texas, explored for gold in the Arctic, mapped geology in Eastern Turkey (where he was befriended by PKK rebels), and rehabilitated water wells in the wilds of Africa. He was in Ethiopia in 1991 as the Mengistu regime fell, survived a bomb blast in a café in Sana’a in 1993, and was one of the last Westerners out of Yemen before the outbreak of the 1994 civil war. In 2022, he criss-crossed Ukraine writing about the Russian invasion. Paul is a university professor and was CEO of the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) from 2017 to 2023. The Abrupt Physics of Dying, the first of the four novels in his critically-acclaimed Claymore Straker series, was shortlisted for the CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger and was a Telegraph Book of the Year. The Forcing, out now, has been short-listed for the Crime Fiction Lovers’ 2023 Awards, and its prequel, The Descent, is out later in 2024.