Sannah and the Pilgrim
When Sannah the Storyteller, a descendant of environmental refugees from drowned Pacific islands, finds a White stranger on her domestep, she presumes he’s a political prisoner on the run seeking safe passage to egalitarian Aotearoa. However, Kaire’s unusual appearance, bizarre behaviour, and insistence he’s a pilgrim suggest otherwise.
Appalled by apartheid Australia, Kaire uses his White privileges to procure vital information for Sannah and her group of activists regarding new desert prisons that are to be built to house all political prisoners. The group plans sabotage but needs help, and Kaire is a willing accomplice. But when Sannah turns Truthteller and threatens to reveal the country’s true history, even Kaire’s White privilege and advanced technology cannot save Sannah and her daughter from retribution.
“A complicated story that intertwines the realities and threats of the twenty-first century, along with the ever present prejudices, with the possibilities of a future that looks even more bleak. It is a compelling tale and readers will certainly be eagerly looking forward to the sequel.” 5 stars
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$24.95
Book Details
| Weight | 363 g |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 229 × 152 mm |
| Extent | 274 pages |
| Format | Paperback |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Climate Fiction |
| Release date | 26 April 2014 |
| ISBN | 9781922200143 |
| Imprint | Odyssey Books |
About The Author
Sue Parritt
Sue Parritt is a fiction writer based in Mornington, Victoria. Her novel Sannah and the Pilgrim, the first in a trilogy of a future dystopian Australia, was published by Odyssey Books in 2014 and was Commended in the FAW Christina Stead Award, 2014. The second, Pia and the Skyman, was published in April 2016. The Sky Lines Alliance completes the trilogy, and will be published in November 2016. Her short stories, poetry and articles have appeared in national and international magazines and anthologies. She has also written a TV series pilot based on Sannah and the Pilgrim, and is now seeking a producer.
Emily-Jane Hills Orford for Readers’ Favorite –
Sannah is a storyteller. She tells stories to her people, stories sanctioned by the government to be acceptable propaganda. Her stories are meant to educate her people into subservience. Her people are brown skinned and live in the Brown Zone. The government, the powers that be, are white. The Brown Zone is a desolate landscape where survival is a daily struggle in a land in which daylight is too dangerous and life and working hours now exist primarily at night. This is, after all, the twenty-fifth century and the planet has undergone a lot of strife: wars, global warming, all the threats that humans of the twenty-first century listened to, but only barely.
Enter Pilgrim Kaire. He’s a traveler, a white traveler at that, but not from another country. Actually, he’s from a sky ship, a completely different group of humans trying to survive after Planet Earth’s multiple catastrophes that made life on Earth very difficult, if not impossible for many. As Sannah learns from Kaire, so too does Kaire learn from Sannah. The two evolve together in their knowledge until Sannah becomes the truthteller, and, at her final trial confesses the truth that she has learned about her planet, that “Greed, arrogance, concern for profit rather than conservation, apathy, egotism — these are some of the words my people hear in Truth-Tales.”
It’s a complicated story that intertwines the realities and threats of the twenty-first century, along with the ever present prejudices, with the possibilities of a future that looks even more bleak. Author Sue Parritt, in this her first book, has created a colony of storytellers and truthtellers, a parallel to life on Earth in the twenty-first century. It is a compelling tale and readers will certainly be eagerly looking forward to the sequel.