Alice Robinson’s third novel (and second foray into speculative fiction) begins with a mother’s bittersweet “second chance at life” – one she never asked for.
One hundred years in the future, 40-year-old Esther is the first of 47 sleepers to be “woken” from cryogenic suspended animation in an underground bunker. She does not know where her children are, and is being cared for by a strange woman her mother’s age, Grace. Over the course of the novel, Esther anxiously speculates on the length of her sleep and reckons with her new reality, as she slowly begins to remember her life and her children.
If You Go unites various tropes and themes of domestic and speculative fiction. Its reflections on loneliness and the personal sacrifices of motherhood are set in a future where the environmental, social, political and economic crises of today are exacerbated.
