They (Paperback)
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Staff Reviews
Originally published in 1977, this rediscovered dystopian classic belongs among the likes of 1984 and Fahrenheit 451. Sparse, eerie, and almost dreamlike, They will leave you with more questions than answers, but the curiosity it evokes will keep you musing on the endless possibilities of art, creativity, and human nature.
— Sarah
A dark, dystopian portrait of artists struggling to resist violent suppression—“queer, English, a masterpiece.” (Hilton Als)
Set amid the rolling hills and the sandy shingle beaches of coastal Sussex, this disquieting novel depicts an England in which bland conformity is the terrifying order of the day. Violent gangs roam the country destroying art and culture and brutalizing those who resist the purge. As the menacing “They” creep ever closer, a loosely connected band of dissidents attempt to evade the chilling mobs, but it’s only a matter of time until their luck runs out.
Winner of the 1977 South-East Arts Literature Prize, Kay Dick’s They is an uncanny and prescient vision of a world hostile to beauty, emotion, and the individual.
Set amid the rolling hills and the sandy shingle beaches of coastal Sussex, this disquieting novel depicts an England in which bland conformity is the terrifying order of the day. Violent gangs roam the country destroying art and culture and brutalizing those who resist the purge. As the menacing “They” creep ever closer, a loosely connected band of dissidents attempt to evade the chilling mobs, but it’s only a matter of time until their luck runs out.
Winner of the 1977 South-East Arts Literature Prize, Kay Dick’s They is an uncanny and prescient vision of a world hostile to beauty, emotion, and the individual.
Kay Dick (1915–2001) was the first female director of an English publishing house, promoted to the role at the age of twenty-six and mixing with what she described “a louche set” that included Ivy Compton-Burnett, Stevie Smith, and Muriel Spark. From the 1940s through the ’60s, she and her long-term partner, the novelist Kathleen Farrell, were at the heart of the London literary scene. She published seven novels, a study of the commedia dell’arte, and two volumes of literary interviews.
Lucy Scholes is a critic who lives in London, and is an editor at McNally Editions.
Lucy Scholes is a critic who lives in London, and is an editor at McNally Editions.
"They is spare, troubling, eerily familiar. It evokes Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge, or Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men, occupying a space between dystopia and horror. The lush landscapes are haunted by profoundly unsettling details about the forces at work—'It was no good listening for footsteps,' the narrator tells us, 'they wore no shoes'—and all of it a backdrop for endless questions about art: What does it mean to create for no audience?"
— Carmen Maria Machado
“It’s incredibly unusual to find a book this good that has been this profoundly forgotten.”
— Sam Knight
"Both a dystopian fable and a stealth memoir . . . Like all robust allegories, They grants the reader the freedom to imagine any number of vivid referents for the opaque."
— Melissa Anderson
“Queer, English, a masterpiece.”
— Hilton Als
"[Kay Dick] is a writer who who respects human beings even in their pettiness or confusion; who regards each of them as a worthy object of study and even tenderness, and who devotes as much space and care to the description of what one might call a thoroughly trivial person as to a creature of heroic design.”
— Vernon Fane
“Kay Dick’s mind is a delicate instrument, aware, sensitive, intelligent, alive to every shade of feeling and sensation.”
— L. P. Hartley
“The dream setting [of They] is cleverly handled, with its shifts of scene and time and its underlying air of menace.”
— Mary Sullivan
“Strong stuff, beautifully written, to make a man look behind him in fear and dread when walking down a leafy lane.”
— Philip Howard
— Carmen Maria Machado
“It’s incredibly unusual to find a book this good that has been this profoundly forgotten.”
— Sam Knight
"Both a dystopian fable and a stealth memoir . . . Like all robust allegories, They grants the reader the freedom to imagine any number of vivid referents for the opaque."
— Melissa Anderson
“Queer, English, a masterpiece.”
— Hilton Als
"[Kay Dick] is a writer who who respects human beings even in their pettiness or confusion; who regards each of them as a worthy object of study and even tenderness, and who devotes as much space and care to the description of what one might call a thoroughly trivial person as to a creature of heroic design.”
— Vernon Fane
“Kay Dick’s mind is a delicate instrument, aware, sensitive, intelligent, alive to every shade of feeling and sensation.”
— L. P. Hartley
“The dream setting [of They] is cleverly handled, with its shifts of scene and time and its underlying air of menace.”
— Mary Sullivan
“Strong stuff, beautifully written, to make a man look behind him in fear and dread when walking down a leafy lane.”
— Philip Howard