Cover

About the Book

Now anyone can have a baby.

With FullLife’s safe and affordable healthcare plan, why risk a natural birth?

Just choose the colour of your pouch and its accessories.

Without the pouch, Eva might not have been born. And yet she has sacrificed her career, and maybe even her relationship, campaigning against FullLife’s biotech baby pouches. Despite her efforts, everyone prefers a world where women are liberated from danger and constraint and all can share the joy of childbearing. Perhaps FullLife has helped transform society for the better? But just as Eva accepts this, she discovers that something strange is happening at FullLife.

Piotr hasn’t seen Eva in years. Not since their life together dissolved in tragedy. But Piotr’s a journalist who has also uncovered something sinister about FullLife. What drove him and Eva apart may just bring them back together, as they search for the truth behind FullLife’s closed doors, and face a truth of their own.

A beautiful story about family, loss and what our future might hold, The Growing Season is an original and powerful novel by a rising talent.

About the Author

Helen Sedgwick was a research scientist working in the field of biophysics before writing her debut novel, The Comet Seekers. She has an MLitt in Creative Writing from Glasgow University and a PhD in Physics from Edinburgh University, and has received a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award. Having grown up in London, she now lives in the Scottish Highlands. The Growing Season is her second novel.

Also by Helen Sedgwick

The Comet Seekers

Dedication

For Michael

Audio log

7 Feb 2016 18:32

This will be my last audio log. I’ve been thinking about how to explain, though perhaps it doesn’t matter now anyway – you didn’t come, and it is too late to make a difference. So I think I might end with the story of the indigo hamlets. You remember – those luminous tropical fish I used to talk about? For ten years I’ve kept them in my aquarium in the outhouse. When I stand between those four walls of Caribbean Sea I can imagine myself in a coral reef with no glass keeping me separate. I suppose they’ll be dead by the time you hear this, but that’s probably for the best. Fish should not be kept in a tank any more than animals housed in a cage or humans confined to a role. We all of us need our freedom, sooner or later. Don’t you think?