Woman Alive

Woman Alive is a curious science fiction novel from 1936 by Anglo-American writer Susan Ertz. The book is set in London in a dystopian future where only one woman is left alive after all others in the world are wiped out in a pandemic caused by a poisonous gas.

This brand new edition is introduced by the acclaimed comedian, broadcaster, actor and writer Graham Norton, who has described the work of Susan Ertz as “glorious”; meanwhile, the new cover has been commissioned by the renowned cartoonist and illustrator Tom Gauld, whose work combines a love of books and science.

Susan Ertz was a popular novelist of the interwar years, best known for her novel Madame Claire, which was chosen as one of the first ten Penguin Books paperbacks in 1935; she also wrote In the Cool of the Day – later adapted into a film of the same name in 1963 – starring Jane Fonda and Angela Lansbury.

However, one of her earlier titles – Woman Alive – is an important work in the canon of speculative fiction, until now largely forgotten among the works of her contemporaries such as George Orwell, H.G. Wells and Aldous Huxley.

Woman Alive is set in 1985 and is at once a satire and a commentary on the rising threat of nationalism in 1930s Britain. The novel is cinematic in structure, conjuring a world in which feminism and pacifism are woven together to tell the story of Stella – an accidental survivor who became queen of England and the hope of humankind.

The relevance of this novel to 21st-century society is of course heightened post-Covid-19. But at its heart it is a love story, a romance of sorts and a page-turner extraordinaire.