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Each citizen must contribute to society.
If a citizen fails to find a suitable objective, one will be assigned.
Seventeen-year-old Astra Fairwood has spent her life in the Canopy Complex – a glittering city in the clouds where Assembly members live free from disease and the telltale signs of aging. Far away, in the Donor Zone, a hidden population exists solely to supply the blood plasma that allows the Assembly to thrive.
As the daughter of the Chief Enforcer, Astra has never questioned the system. Why would she? Her future is secure – a life of parties and privilege.
Until everything is taken from her.
Cast out of the Canopy and condemned to the Donor Zone, Astra is forced into the very world she was raised to fear. The Founder claims the Zone provides a haven for society's worst – the criminals, the lawless, the expendable. But the truth is far more dangerous than she imagined. When Astra meets a girl in the Zone who challenges everything she thought she wanted, she begins to question not only the Assembly but the future that was chosen for her as well.
With tensions rising and the people she loves most in danger, Astra must soon decide who the real monsters are – and how far she's willing to go to stop them.
– Faith Shearin, Leapfrog Global Fiction Prize judge and award-winning author of Lost River 1918
"Many fantastic dystopian concepts...Full of complex characters...The detailed world is a triumph and the story itself is compelling. A real page turner. " –Becca Barnes, award-winning author and producer of Power Rangers
She spent her childhood with her nose buried in books. After university, she spent a decade in publishing sales at The Guardian and New Scientist before moving into early years education, where she taught phonics using storytelling, puppets, and a fair amount of enthusiastic (if questionable) singing.
More recently, Tara worked at Ingenious, a company making collagen supplements. She was fascinated by the increasingly clever ways science can trick our bodies into looking and feeling younger, and the inspiration for her novel Little Mice came from a news segment about young blood plasma being used to rejuvenate older people — a concept she found both intriguing and unsettling. The idea lingered: What happens when youth itself becomes a commodity?
She lives in South London, England with her husband, teenage children, an adventurous cat, and a spectacularly lazy dog.