In a future that may be scarily closer than we think, The Feed dominates everything. We are connected to The Feed 24/7 and everything we do, everything we know, every emotion and interaction we have, is made public through The Feed. The Feed has rendered physical books obsolete. The Feed has rendered physical speech almost redundant. The Feed is all we need.

Tom’s father invented The Feed but Tom has rejected it. His wife Kate, however, is as addicted to The Feed as is almost everybody else. And then something hijacks The Feed and the slaughter begins.

The Feed is destroyed now and society has collapsed into a savage lawlessness, but the threat remains. Survivors can still be ‘taken’ in their sleep, their minds and bodies possessed by murderous entities. That is why, when we sleep, someone must always stay awake, watching us. And if we show signs of being taken, we must be killed before we can open our eyes.

Tom and Kate are among the survivors, and now they have a six-year-old daughter. They live peacefully in a community with several others, but when they are attacked during the night and their daughter is abducted, Tom and Kate begin the dangerous journey to get her back. It is a journey that will change both of them forever, in ways that could never be expected.

The Feed is easily one of the most powerful and disturbing novels of the year, a dystopian mash-up of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers (sans alien pods) with a heavy nod towards John Wyndham, Nigel Kneale, Philip K Dick and Orwell’s 1984. But, for all those influences, it is also intensely original and constantly surprising, with some quite brilliant switches of POV, more than a couple of nasty moments that will have you squirming as you read them, and a genius twist midway into the story which completely throws everything through a mind-searing loop. It is hard to believe this is Nick Clark Windo’s debut novel – he is a formidable writer, plugging his prose directly into the emotional centre of his reader as surely as The Feed is plugged into his character’s cerebella. The Feed is a visceral experience – engrossing, thought-provoking, bleak but also strangely hopeful, and deeply unsettling. It is also, we predict, going to be one of the genre juggernauts of 2018 – no doubt with a major feature film adaptation not far behind – and it deserves all the acclaim it gets.

THE FEED / AUTHOR: NICK CLARK WINDO / PUBLISHER: HEADLINE / RELEASE DATE:  JANUARY 25TH