Review - The People's Republic of Love by Heather Child

The People's Republic of Love 

Heather Child
SRL Publishing, 31 March 2026, 
Available as: PB, 420pp, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(PB): 9781915073563

I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me access to an advance e-copy of The People's Republic of Love to consider for review.

I'm writing this review with a degree of irony, ion time when the Gulf states, abode of influencers, tax exiles - and of course a number of hardworking, unfortunate people too - are being consumed by the sort of world catastrophe to which they were supposed to be immune.

In a near future, Tamsin is an engineer, working for a contractor patching up the London Tube. Inspired by her great hero, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and sharing his short stature, she posts on her socials as TunnelFairy.

Tamsin’s friend Charlotte is a struggling actor, who had success with a reality show, Six on the Beach, but whose career hasn’t really taken off. She’s now signed up for Get Outta My Room, an escape room themed show being filmed in The People’s Republic of Love, a collection of artificial islands in the Caribbean. The Republic is a libertarian paradise with little government, only an AI administration presided over by a Governor chosen on the basis of follower count.

It’s a Republic of clicks and likes, a world of performance and image, vastly different from Tamsin’s world of forces, tunnels and calculations. 

Yet when Charlotte finds herself in real danger on her show, it’s Tamsin who has to enter that world to find out what is going on - drawing on her own disastrous early attempts at stardom. Can she do better this time?

This was an intriguing and very different story from Heather Child. The juxtaposition between the two worlds is clever. The book might appear to contrast the evanescent one of crypto, image-making and trends with a solid, "real" universe of facts and numbers, but as Tamsin's battered copy of Brunel's biography makes clear, the great engineer wasn't above leaps of faith and fantasy and he was much concerned with his image. Tamsin discovers that her employer, too, is far from solid and reliable and is also preoccupied with publicity and spin.

There is in contrast a real sense of solidity to the relationship between the two women - grounded in their childhood friendship and their later experience acting in a calamitous version of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. We see a lot about what this means to both, and why it’s Tamsin that Charlotte reaches out too. It's a relationship that is tested severely through the book, with Charlotte unable to be sure that Tamsin will rescue her and as Charlotte seems to lose herself in the world she's had to enter, yet the bonds are strong.

We also see how the evil genius behind the escape room show plays on Charlotte’s insecurities, and especially the death of her mother, to disorientate and terrify her. This is a glimpse of a world where your entire history - every message, every post, every moment caught by ubiquitous cameras and mikes - can be reassembled and weaponised against you. The Republic eagerly buys into this radical openness, with residents deported if they won’t update their socials. Tamsin reflects on how it affects one’s private behaviours, every move and gesture apart geared towards those watching.

This turns out to be a game that Tamsin is very good at, however. Forced to play it for the safety and freedom of her friend, she is transformed from the dowdy engineer in her PPE to an uber-influencer in designer couture and heels. The question is, how much of what makes Tamsin, Tamsin, will be left by the time she’s done?

An absorbing story that really makes you care about its main characters - and which shows how things are never really over, even after the hero’s pulled off an impossible rescue. Recommended.

For more information about The People's Republic of Love, see the publisher's website here.