Should I be celebrating the fact that whatever happens to us on the outside, we can always choose our womanhood the inside? If we have had our rights taken away, are we assured of our right to repress others, and kill them in our turn? The implication is that the Authority has fallen, and this document has been found in the ruins, so it's a history, in a sense.

The first floor has exposed waney ceiling beams and rafters throughout, and timber lintels and window seats. She tells of her attempts to escape this repressive world and her journey to join the commune of women at Carhullan, a group living as 'unofficials' in a fortified farm beyond the most remote Cumbrian fells. Suffocated and stifled by the authoritarian regime, alienated from her husband and violated by her coil, Sister resolves to escape this wasted life.In addition, guests can give separate ‘subscores’ in crucial areas, such as location, cleanliness, staff, comfort, facilities, value for money and free Wi-Fi. Under the repressive regime of The Authority, citizens have been herded into urban centres, and all women of child-bearing age fitted with contraceptive devices. To most of us, though, it would seem pretty bleak, lacking much in the way of spirituality, poetry or humour, never mind the rather weedy selection of men available in a nearby settlement and the constant sinister undercurrent of violence. Tight, unsentimental writing telling us as women so much about ourselves and the world we inhabit now. Lisa wrote: "Apart from the fact that your first sentence made this a must read for me, are you really sure a lady in her eighties can still mobilise that amount of aggressive energy?

Following economic collapse, the population has been corralled into the cities of old under the guise of Civil Reorganisation although it seems to me that the main benefit to the Authority is to have the population in a defined and manageable area. To the right of the porch (the early-C18 extension) there are four windows: the two first floor and one of the ground floor windows are two-light stone mullions.Here in the empty Lakeland village I couldn’t have explained to anyone exactly how secure I felt, even if there had been someone around to listen to me. Most people are serfs, without rights, confined to the decaying towns, and women are forcibly fitted with coils. A dystopian vision of a disturbingly near future in which the floods have risen and the oil has run out . Considering the recent spate of unseasonable weather and car bombs, Sarah Hall's third novel can't help but have a certain resonance. Even then, much of the action happens off page, although we’re told enough to understand what happens and why.

I have been trying for years to resist the urge to translate books into movie stars/actors/corporate visual images as a means of keeping my head straight and concentrating on ideas an author is putting out — or maybe digging in! A mixture of exhaustion and elation fills the narrator as she climbs the brant slopes towards Carhullan farm, but the welcome she receives is sterner than she had fondly imagined. Built in 1504 by Prior Thomas Docwra, St John’s Gate was the south gateway to the Priory of Clerkenwell, the headquarters of the Knights of St John of Jerusalem.When a post-apocalyptic city is visited, it is often, as in Day of the Triffids, or the Survivors episode ‘The Lights of London’, the nation’s capital (the recent Survivors reboot filmed in Manchester and Birmingham, but in both cases the city seems intended to stand in for London). Sykes Holiday Cottages is an independent holiday cottage rental agency, with the finest selection of holidays across the UK and Ireland.