I’m thrilled to welcome you today to my publication day stop on the blog tour for the scarily relevant and all too believable The Waiting Rooms by Eve Smith. Thank you to Anne Cater and Orenda Books for giving me the opportunity to read and review this outstanding book.
About the book:
Swinging from South Africa to England: one woman’s hunt for her birth mother in an all-too-believable near future in which an antibiotic crisis has decimated the population. A prescient, thrilling debut.
Decades of spiralling drug resistance have unleashed a global antibiotic crisis. Ordinary infections are untreatable, and a scratch from a pet can kill. A sacrifice is required to keep the majority safe: no one over seventy is allowed new antibiotics. The elderly are sent to hospitals nicknamed ‘The Waiting Rooms’ … hospitals where no one ever gets well.
Twenty years after the crisis takes hold, Kate begins a search for her birth mother, armed only with her name and her age. As Kate unearths disturbing facts about her mother’s past, she puts her family in danger and risks losing everything. Because Kate is not the only secret that her mother is hiding. Someone else is looking for her, too.
Sweeping from an all-too-real modern Britain to a pre-crisis South Africa, The Waiting Rooms is epic in scope, richly populated with unforgettable characters, and a tense, haunting vision of a future that is only a few mutations away.
About the author:
Eve Smith’s debut novel The Waiting Rooms was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize First Novel Award.
Eve writes speculative fiction, mainly about the things that scare her. She attributes her love of all things dark and dystopian to a childhood watching Tales of the Unexpected and black-and-white Edgar Allen Poe double bills. Eve’s flash fiction has been shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award and highly commended for The Brighton Prize.
In this world of questionable facts, stats and news, she believes storytelling is more important than ever to engage people in real life issues.
Eve recently contributed a piece of flash fiction, Belting Up, to an anthology of crime shorts called Noir From the Bar. The collection of stories has been launched to raise money for the NHS.
Eve’s previous job as COO of an environmental charity took her to research projects across Asia, Africa and the Americas, and she has an ongoing passion for wild creatures, wild science and far-flung places.
A Modern Languages graduate from Oxford, she returned to Oxfordshire fifteen years ago to set up home with her husband.
When she’s not writing, she’s chasing across fields after her dog, attempting to organise herself and her family or off exploring somewhere new.
Follow Eve: @evecsmith on Twitter & http://www.evesmithauthor.com
Instagram: evesmithauthor Facebook: EveSmithAuthor
My Review:
I’m always excited whenever Orenda Books publish a new book but wow, what a thrilling and thought provoking debut novel The Waiting Rooms by Eve Smith is! Reading this book at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic definitely put a different and more poignant spin on the events that happen in this brilliant piece of speculative fiction. This is a book that chilled me to the core with how scarily relevant and completely believable it is!
In a world where antibiotics have stopped working, leading to a worldwide crisis where many lives have been lost, life for everyone has changed. Even the slightest infection can now kill and, with new drugs in very limited supply, the over seventies are no longer offered treatment. Instead, they are placed into hospitals known as ‘The Waiting Rooms’, destined to never see the outside world again.
The story is told from the alternate points of view of Kate, Lily and Mary, with the details of what happened pre-crisis and what is happening now, twenty years later, slowly being revealed bit by bit as we move through the book.
I don’t want to say too much for fear of spoiling the plot, so all I will say is that this book drew me in from the very first page and didn’t let go until the final page had been turned. Eve Smith has written a chilling, thought provoking and all too believable story that I know will stay with me for a long time to come.
A shocking but scarily relevant read, The Waiting Rooms is a stunning debut that I would not hesitate to recommend.
The Waiting Rooms by Eve Smith is available to buy now: Amazon UK
Check out what these other lovely bloggers have to say about this thought provoking book:
Cal Turner Reviews 
Thanks for the blog tour support Cal xx
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It really was my pleasure, Anne! ❤️ xx
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