Then, she is handed a bottle of water, a sandwich and a compass, and sent alone into the world.įrom the opening page, Mackintosh zeroes in on a choice that currently represents the crossroads at the heart of my own life, whether I want it to or not. Our protagonist Calla pulls a blue ticket. A white ticket means that you must have a child, blue that you cannot. Sophie Mackintosh’s dream-like, ominous novel Blue Ticket is a book in this tradition, set in a world that looks very similar to our own – except that when a girl hits puberty, she is removed from school and entered into a lottery that determines whether she will have children or be banned from doing so. But some of the most ambitious and challenging examinations of womanhood are taking place in the realm of speculative fiction. In recent years, writers such as Rebecca Solnit, Roxane Gay and Sheila Heti have produced varied works scrutinising how women move through the world. As the Belgian philosopher Luce Irigaray declared in 1984, “sexual difference is one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue, of our age” – and it has only become more pressing and less clear in the years since, as we continue to wrestle at the practical and political level with a raft of complex questions. In more recent decades, I sense, the focus has shifted onto women.

Once, not so very long ago, it seemed that much of literature was preoccupied by a single central question: what did it mean to be a man? Was it manly deeds, a lion’s heart? Was man primarily a political animal, or was he engaged in a more primal struggle against nature? Sophie Mackintosh's Blue Ticket explores the question: 'should I have kids?'įrom the autumn 2020 edition of New Humanist.īlue Ticket (Hamish Hamilton) by Sophie Mackintosh

Blue ticket a novel