Gin, (the Mender) for example seemed to have come straight out of the central casting box labelled “creepy, oddball forest woman.” Once I’d met them via their labels, it was hard to see them any other way, certainly not as living, breathing individuals. Partly because It was hard to engage with the women featured and to see them as real people. The novel has a lot of potential but never really lived up to its initial promise. They just want to get on with their lives but know that the choices they make will bring public censure, hostility and punishment.

Red Clocks shows the challenges facing these women in a society which is steadily denying them agency over their own bodies. She was not and never would be one of them. Women who worried about ticking clocks were the same women who traded salmon-loaf recipes and asked their husbands to clean the gutters. The biographer used to sneer at talk of biological deadlines, believing the topic of baby craziness to be crap for lifestyle magazines. As the story progresses, we discover their names and histories and how they feel about parenthood. They’re introduced purely with labels connected to their roles so we have the Mender, the Wife, the Biographer and the Daughter. The connection between these four is not immediately apparent, nor are their identities made clear until some way into the narrative. And in the woods outside the town lives a wise woman who offers homeopathic help to women in trouble. We also meet a frustrated mother of two whose marriage is falling apart. Termination is, she feels, her only option but this is now classed as conspiracy to commit murder, and Mattie already knows what happened when her best friend tried to self-abort. Her star pupil Mattie dreams of securing a place at a prestigious maths college but discovers she is pregnant. Ro, a single high-school teacher, desperately wants her IVF treatment to work before the ban comes into force.

The consequences of these rules is seen through four women in a small Oregon town. Restrictions on other reproductive rights are about to be introduced through the ‘Personhood Ammendment” In a bid “ to restore dignity, strength, and prosperity to American families”, IVF will be outlawed as will adoption by single parents. Travel across the border to seek treatment in Canada is also prohibited.

Leni Zumas imagines an America where abortion is illegal, punishable by imprisonment. Red Clocks is an alarmingly prescient novel, made doubly unnerving by the clamp down on abortion across large swathes of the US following the Supreme Court ruling.

Red clocks by leni zumas