Blogtour review - Kill Them With Kindness by Will Carver

Kill Them with Kindness
Will Carver
Orenda Books, 19 June 2025
Available as: PB, 292pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781916788381

I'm grateful to Orenda for sending me a copy of Kill Them With Kindness to consider for review, and to Anne for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

A worldwide coronavirus pandemic. 

Shady but well-connected figures eager to profit from the misery. Lockdowns. 

A foppish, populist UK PM who can't keep his trousers zipped up for more than half an hour.

All signalling, then, that Kill them with Kindness has no bearing AT ALL on actual recent world history. So the speculation here that the virus, and the vaccine, was scheduled; that a third party intervened to change it from what it might have been; and that a secret cabal of world leaders knew rather more about matters that they let on - can all be safely indulged in the interests of a fascinating and knotty plot that nevertheless dramatises some of the real dilemmas that we faced a few years back. Carver's writing is excellently adapted to the. He has the rare ability - no, scratch that, unique, at least so far as I'm aware - to dramatise not only the events of a story but also the actual ethics of it.

Here, that is done mainly though two characters - the blustering, blond Harris Jackson, Prime Minister of the UK, who can't encounter a woman without seeking to impregnate her, and brilliant but modest Dr Haruko Ikeda, a Japanese scientist who works at a Chinese research centre backed by American money. Jackson doesn't care if a few million people die, so long as it serves his purposes. Ikeda wants to save lives, but he has a wider vision than that: to make life, people, kinder. While the two never meet, they are in effect the players in the chess game, well matched since one has immense political power but - seemingly - little empathy, while the other brims over with empathy but is being forced to act by circumstances.

Carver's portrayal of both men is superb, but it's only part of the storytelling here. Events, literally taking part on a world scale, are given life by vignettes of individuals, too many to list, across the nations and of all ages and social positions. This author is a master of the telling phrase, the perfect description or action, showing what people are doing or thinking. These go beyond simply the reaction - people are panicked, people are scared, people are greedy, selfish or heroes, or whatever - to engage with the rights and wrongs, the awkward unexpected reactions, the unintended consequences, of the story. 

Carver widens his canvas, I think, here, compared to previous books where events were often focussed on a small locality - a building, a village - but despite this larger stage he still makes the story connect very directly with a reader's own experience and convictions. It helps here of course that we have all recently gone through a pandemic so many of the experiences described and the trains of thought are closely rooted in observed experience. That connectedness means that Kill Them with Kindness is at the same time a deeply serious and thoughtful book - the author's argument about the value of simple kindness deserves respect - as well as an absorbing and often funny read. 

Carver never disappoints, and Kill them with Kindness is a stunner of a read.

For more information about Kill Them with Kindness, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can buy Kill them with Kindness from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith, or Waterstones.

#Review - Last One at the Party by Bethany Clift

Cover design by Jo Myler

Last One at the Party
Bethany Clift
Hodder, 4 February 2021
Available as: HB, 355pp, e, audio
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN: 9781529332124

I'm grateful to Hodder for an advance e-copy of Last One at the Party via NetGalley to consider for review. I have also bought a hardback copy from Wallingford Bookshop, my usual enablers in these matters.

There is so much in Last One at the Party. It is a brilliant premise, admittedly not original but executed with verve and empathy, creating such a good, readable book.

Our narrator - we never learn her name - is, literally, the least lone at the party. (She points out that this is her won't, she's always the one left behind collecting the lost coats and cleaning up the house). She's the only person to have survived the End of Days - a sudden, distressing and inevitably fatal virus which sweeps the world before any measures can be found to contain it. Set a few years in the future, there are call-backs to the current covid-19 pandemic but 6DM is in a different league.

We're never told why she survived - this isn't a painstakingly researched pandemic book, nor would it be in character for our hero to understand such matters - she tells us herself that she's not very practical and changing a lightbulb is at the limit of what she can manage. When disaster falls, she struggles to deal with her husband's body, and then sets off into London for a several weeks's booze and drug spree, occupying the best hotel rooms she can access and looting Harrods for fancy bags and scarves.

If you are the sort of reader who lusts after the complexities and details of survival post apocalyse - food stocks, medical supplies, firearms, fuel and so on - you will I think probably leave the book there. That isn't what Last One at the Party is about AT ALL. Our protagonist has an almost wilful lack of survival skills and refuses to acquire them now she needs them. She also refuses to carry out what seems like a basic act of mercy, which left me really not liking her much in this part of the story.

What she does have, though, is self-awareness. As she narrates her story, she recalls her earlier life and the layers of expectations it created for her; her ideal parents, with their romantic outlook on life, her girl friend Ginny, who has mentored and mounted here at work; her self-destructive gay best friend Xav; her husband James. It becomes clear that she was in a mess before the pandemic and I even began to suspect that the helplessness we see at the start of the book was as much a mask as any of the other "selves" that she seems to have developed through life. As the book continued I became more and more fascinated and intrigued by this complex, human and constantly developing character. It's almost as if, to be who she really is, she needs to lose everything and everyone. Then she needs to find a way to live with herself - the one successful response to the pandemic has been the distribution of vast stocks of suicide pills, a continual temptation, and the narrator has also managed to source ample supplies of Tramadol.

It is, at least to begin with, a relatively safe, abundant world that she falls into. There is nobody else around to fight for the large stocks of food left behind - everyone died so quickly that shortages didn't develop - and electricity and water continue to operate for some weeks (the main feature of this apocalypse that felt a bit off, I suspect power would be gone in days - though car satnav would probably work for ages, those satellites aren't going anywhere). In a sense that provides a cushion, allowing the narrator to come to terms with her loss (well, not really come to terms, but to begin to). It's understandable, I think, that she goes a bit off the rails, with no immediate need to be practical.

That does change, but the book never gets to full-on "Survivors" mode with the solution of practical problems the overriding driver. There are some sticky moments, dangers, and crises (the ultimate one leading to a situation of great jeopardy which the narrator is able to meet with determination and skill) but the real drama here always arises from the earlier choices the narrator made, and her sometimes brutally honest assessments of them.  We see her happy and fulfilled as a music journalist before a crisis brings that to an end, then, again, happily working for a shipping journal and globetrotting to write up a port or a tanker (she learns at one point to make a fishing net - so, maybe not as impractical as she claims). We see that end, and her changing as she thinks she must to satisfy others - husband, co-workers, her parents. 

Her life seems to get darker, with the eruption of 6DM coming almost as a deliverance. What would you do if you were suddenly alone to enjoy, intact, all the goodies of life? This book certainly made me ponder what I'd do, where I'd go, if freed from the need to worry about the everyday. Making a new world, a new life, must be about more than stockpiling fuel and rigging solar panels, it has to start within oneself. That's the insight that Clift so brilliantly explores in this book and it is so much more interesting than mere practicalities. In fact, it's a cracker of a book and one I'd strongly recommend. (In the end, the empathy and insight of Clift's writing even won me over to sympathise with her protagonist, despite some misgivings at the start - if you find yourself hating her at one point, give it some time, keep going).

For more information about Last One at the Party, see the publisher's website here.

Review - Afterland by Lauren Beukes

Afterland
Lauren Beukes
Michael Joseph, 3 September 2020
Available as: HB, 464pp, e, audio
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN: 9780718182809

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of Afterland via NetGalley.

It's been too long since Lauren Beukes had a new book out so I was really looking forward to reading Afterland - and it didn't disappoint.

What I hadn't realised was how much the experience of reading which would be influenced by the covid-19 pandemic.

Afterland is, inescapably, a post-pandemic book - its world has been shaped by one - and, inescapably, a pre-pandemic book, written Before Covid. An author wouldn't, now, I think be able to write, 'You can't imagine how much the world can change in just six months. You just can't'.

Kudos to Beukes though for making this point in the before and for nailing so much else from the panic buying ('A notice at the cash register with a sad-face emoji reads, "Sorry! Hand sanitiser sold out!"') to imagining a disease with an impact that isn't only immediate - her fictional virus is flu-like and doesn't cause mass deaths - but which has longer term, devastating effects. In this case they're worse than the "long covid" we're beginning to hear about, rather the 'Human Culgoa Virus' has a nasty payload of aggressive, untreatable prostate cancer which means that within a few years, the male population has been practically wiped out with only a few men and boys left.

Miles is one such boy, and this story is about how he, his mother Cole, and his Aunt Billie fare in a desperate, hand-to-mouth road trip across the US, seeking safety from the Government, from gangsters, terrorists and religious extremists. Stranded in the US by the onset of the HCV wave, all Cole wants to do is to get her boy home to South Africa. But healthy males - males who've survived infection - are a sought after commodity and both of them are soon taken into custody, allegedly for Miles's protection, apparently for research. No contact with lawyers is allowed and Cole is threatened with prosecution for allegedly trying to 'traffic' her own son out of the country. But they're kept in comfort, at least while others starve amidst the economic wreckage caused by the virus.

The story follows Miles (sometimes Mila, once he and his mum take flight), Cole, and Billie through their journey, with excursions into the past and - in Cole's case - interruptions, in her head, from her dead husband, Devon. It's dominated by two relationships - those between Billie and Cole, and between Miles and Cole.

Cole is haunted by guilt. Guilt that, improbably, her son survived while so many others didn't. Guilt about Billie, who was hurt in the escape and who she fears may be dead. Billie seems to be driven by fear and resentment. Beukes shows us correspondingly different - often amusingly different - views of Cole's and Billie's past as the two women recall their childhood in South Africa. It's a vivid depiction, showing how the events of the novel are driven by that shared and disputed history, and in particular how Cole's judgement and even her basic present-ness in her own life are sapped by that paralysing, haunting guilt. She and Miles can ill-afford that: they are on the run, hunted, with few resources and no friends.

Cole and Miles are depicted in just as much complexity. Yes, at one level they are mother and son (sometimes, daughter) coping with the loss of Devon to HCV and the hostile environment into which they've fallen.  At another, Miles is on the cusp of adolescence and just as that comes, he's forced to disguise himself, to deny who he is, to wrestle not only with childhood monsters - the figure of Cancer Fingers who he imagines hiding under the bed - but with adult fear and guilt: he carefully doesn't ask about Billie, for example, even as he blames himself at first for the trouble his mother's in (she's only doing it to protect him) then swings to blaming her for upsetting his own plans ('She ruins everything. Everything.') This relationship is under pressure and the fault line runs through that traditional area, what Mum thinks is best for their kid and what said kid comes to want. Again, impressive to see such a basic, human reality maintained alongside the grand chaos and dislocation caused by the virus.

Starting, as this book does, very much in the middle of events, it took me a little while to understand the magnitude of the danger Miles is in, entwined as that is with the consequences of the pandemic. A live male is both a target - there are terrorists who want to finish 'what God started' - and a tempting asset, to be seized and literally, as Billie puts it, 'milked' (in the aftermath of HCV, worldwide 'reprohibition' bars any and all reproduction, not only to prevent the birth of males who will die a horrible death but from a fear that it may somehow permit an even worse mutation of the virus, one that will destroy humanity completely). That understanding came as Beukes gradually unpacked the wider context of what was going on post-HCV, especially through a group of wandering nuns preaching repentance by women. Only sufficient repentance, contrition and abasement by woman (who, they believe, are to blame for the catastrophe) will move God to put things right.

It's a rather brilliant and telling point that even in the almost total absence of men, this near-future, post-apocalyptic society still manages to centre them, with the surviving women apparently subordinate. This despite the fact that civilisation carries on, all the work is being done, society functioning perfectly well even if the long-term prospects might be limited. I do, sadly, find it convincing that this would the case.

It's all vividly, convincingly shown. The writing is sharp ('Aluta continua. But they're not going to be able to continua much longer without cash money...', 'the stars are so cold and bright like God's LEDs') and at the centre, as I have said, are those relationships, especially between mother and son. Despite the desperate situation they're in, growing-up doesn't stop, mourning a father you've seen die in agony doesn't stop, biology doesn't stop, and that relationship is active, developing, going all sorts of ways with secrets being kept, at times dangerous secrets and decisions taken, at times the wrong decisions. There will be moments when you read this book and want to scream and somebody "No! Don't do that!"

There will be other times when you smile at the interaction between Cole and Miles, especially when they go into a kind of geeky shorthand, experiencing the world through films, comics and genre references ('She's so unprepared for all this. Miles needs a Ripley, a Furiosa, Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2...', 'The kanji attack, and we have to work together to pilot the robot mechanics suits to defeat them?') It's a powerfully drawn, true relationship, a living relationship, often on the brink of going wrong and Beukes gives it pitch-perfectly. In the end I felt that the apocalyptic setting and the dreadful things we see and hear about were, properly, just background to this important story. Which of course only makes the stakes higher when things begin to go wrong.

Basically, I loved this book, and I think you will, too.

For more about Afterland, see the publisher's website here.