Rating 3.5) —- I’ve read a lot of feminist dystopian books and books were the gender roles have been reversed and lately I’ve found it hard to find one with a unique concept but the premise of this book is really unique and like nothing I had read before. What I liked most though was how this was dealt with as the men weren’t just dismissed and ignored, they were treated as something that needed protection. This leads to women being the ‘protectors’ and the way they could protect these men was by isolating them and making sure they followed the rules. The way they kept them happy was by indulging them but it becomes clear this is in fact done to control them like men did to women of the past. Sometimes you read dystopian books and whilst the concept may work the execution of life after it seems so extreme that it feels too far fetched but this one kind of makes sense. You have to keep the men safe from being exposed so they have to stay indoors, therefore, women will have to be the gender that runs the world. Oh, Mary, don’t be ridiculous. Their brains aren’t wired for complex ideas....they’re just men – emotional and fragile." I wanted to explore what would happen if a percentage of men suddenly became violent. I wrote the novel at the height of the Me Too movement. Women, frustrated by the mental, emotional, sexual and cultural violence against women and girls that permeates our society, were screaming.

Finding a world that has been turned upside down is nothing new. But now we have a society where women are the dominant power and men are marginalised. The themes explored in Moths are extremely relevant such as sexism and freedom, but unlike books such as The Handmaid's Tale, the boot is on the other foot. The men of this world are enslaved, not just for health reasons if you get my meaning. He didn’t. He was too busy doing the dishes and considering the latest trends in navy blue M&S trousers, to worry his pretty little head about such things. How do you treat the trans community in the novel? Forty years ago, the world changed in Jane Hennigan’s Moths. Toxic threads left behind by mutated moths infected men and boys around the globe. Some were killed quietly in their sleep, others became crazed killers, wildly dangerous and beyond help. All seemed hopeless. But humanity adapted, healed and moved on.

On the topic of trans people, there do not seem to be trans men in the story at all, though there is one odd reference to a woman who has had a mastectomy/top surgery scars because (paraphrased) “some women just feel their breasts get in the way.” Queer women are quite prevalent though, and many wives are mentioned throughout the story. The secondary main character Olivia is a lesbian, but she is murdered and framed for killing and “grooming” a “helpless” infantilized man. She was a POV character but after she is killed the rest of the story is just continued from Mary’s perspective only which seemed like a very odd choice from a writing standpoint.

Set decades after the outbreak, the book follows Mary and Olivia- two women who remember the day it all began.Mary is a carer in one of the facilities, she is also one of the few people who remember the world the way it was before. But it's dangerous to talk about it, not wise to give the wrong impression. But Mary is careful, she does her job and mainly keeps to herself. No one knows the son that she secretly visits in the sanitorium, no one has any idea of her life before or that she even had a son. Still not sure? Why not read our interview with Garth Nix here to find out more about the one of the masters of fantasy world building. Moths is told using a dual timeline, mixing the moments when the pandemic was starting and the present, fourty years after. While the pacing at the present time tends to be slower and calmer, the memories of our characters tend to depict more tense moments, and it balances pretty well.

So, what is feminist here? Clearly not the world itself, which paints all men as evil and all women as weak and incapable.

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We need to talk about Mary! It would have been easy to write a young protagonist looking ahead to her life in your world of secrets; what drew you to an older, retrospective protagonist instead? (Aside from, of course, the need for more representation of older women in general!) I wanted to imagine and write about a society that wasn’t governed by men and to escape preconceived notions of hetero normativity and feminine essentialism. So, I needed a vehicle to get rid of the vast majority of men for an extended period of time. I considered a disease, but I wanted it to be fast-moving and airborne, surrounding the world in days rather than weeks. Then I saw the article on the BBC about toxic caterpillars and began tentatively plotting out the story. As I wrote I leaned into the creepy reputation of moths to create atmosphere. I realised moths are perfect for this kind of dark storytelling – how they swarm around a light, how they sit dead still on surfaces as if lying in wait. There’s something about caterpillars that give me chills. The spiky hairs and the bright colours – it’s like an instinctive part of me screams don’t touch them! This book is different from other feminist dystopian works like 'Widowland' or 'The Handmaid's Tale', in that it's women who hold the power here. As the story progresses, Mary discovers that things in this post-moth world may not be what they seem. The book unearths fascinating ethical questions about personal freedom, the greater good, and hundreds of years of societal patriarchy. A divergent future with a thought-provoking feminist slant, perfect for those who loved The Power, The Handmaid's Tale and Vox.