ISBNs Print: 978-1-913665-33-3 EPub: 978-1-913665-34-0 Kindle: 978-1-913665-35-7 Audio: 978-1-913665-22-7

234x156mm 168pp Science Fiction

24th June 2021

A Novel in short stories, by Lily Peters

Buy the print version from our webshop

also available as an audiobook narrated by Margaret Ashley, Ben Clifford, Beth Frieden, Cornelia Colman, Kenneth Michaels, Lisa Rose, Olivia Rose-Michaels, Shubhita Chaturvedi, and Tigger Blaize.

Sample chapter – Up on the Roof – at Noon read by Beth Frieden

Available from Audible and all other audiobook sellers, and from your library.

Set mostly in the north of the UK, in a near future.

Women march together in protest at a government reneging on climate promises. Two glorified paper pushers in Spain help British ex-pats escape a heatwave that will soon lay waste to most of southern Europe. A twitter storm erupts in the panic of a real tempest. In the northeast, a beloved allotment sinks below the waterline. Sea levels rise, toxic rain falls and the earth poisons the food that grows in it. The elite, and winners of the life lottery, are evacuated to giant towers. As a notional government tries to keep control at ground level, eco warriors, protestors and radical ‘allotmenteers’ proliferate. In the towers, new blueprints for the regime of the future are drawn up. For many, a decision has to be made between living safe or living free.

Reviews:

“Accidental Flowers is a single united fabric but pieced together from a patchwork of short stories. Think of James Joyce’s Dubliners and you have Lily’s working blueprint. What I admired most was the enormously diverse ways in which she frames her central narrative, which is a rather shocking vision of social re-ordering… I was provoked and charmed, disturbed and moved by Peter’s short story sequence. I am expecting exciting things from her in the future.” – Mark Cocker

“This novel is a warning. It is filled with fragments of lives torn apart and people displaced, trying to come to terms with a reality they refused to believe in and ignored for too long. It’s familiar North East setting makes it all the more relatable and unsettling, forcing the reader to think the unthinkable. It is a powerful collection of humanity and prose. Possibly not an easy read but I would say essential.” Book Bound blog