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The Waiting Rooms

Author(s): Eve Smith

Location(s): United Kingdom, South Africa

Genre(s): Dystopian, Thriller

Era(s): 1990s and contemporary

Location

Content

Decades of spiralling drug resistance have unleashed a global antibiotic crisis. Ordinary infections are untreatable, and a scratch from a pet can kill. A sacrifice is required to keep the majority safe: no one over seventy is allowed new antibiotics. The elderly are sent to hospitals nicknamed ‘The Waiting Rooms’ … hospitals where no one ever gets well.

Twenty years after the crisis takes hold, Kate begins a search for her birth mother, armed only with her name and her age. As Kate unearths disturbing facts about her mother’s past, she puts her family in danger and risks losing everything. Because Kate is not the only secret that her mother is hiding. Someone else is looking for her, too.

Sweeping from an all-too-real modern Britain to a pre-crisis South Africa, The Waiting Rooms is epic in scope, richly populated with unforgettable characters, and a tense, haunting vision of a future that is only a few mutations away.

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Book Reviews

Lead Review

Author: tripfiction

You might think this novel is set at some point in the future. Fiction set in a dystopian world. But it is set in a parallel universe. The “Crisis” happened in the later 20th...

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