I’m very pleased with the cover of IF THEN by Raid71. IF THEN ties two ends of the world together: a lost battle of the First World War and its consequences over a hundred years later in the lives of a post-collapse Sussex town. Raid71’s powerful cover brings these two devastating moments together, with a melancholic but cool precision.

I only finished editing the novel a couple of weeks ago so there was only time to send the novel out to a couple of writers whose work I admire. Simon Ings, the author of Wolves (Gollancz,2014), The Weight of Numbers and Dead Water was kind enough to read this advance proof and let me know his thoughts about IF THEN. And here they are:

‘Matthew De Abaitua has written a novel about employment, about daily labour, about the dignity or otherwise of the working individual. IF THEN is a love story, the history of a marriage, a topical meditation on the end of capitalism; best of all, it is a bone-deep, blood-sweet British fantasy, naive and ingenious as William Morris and as warpedly nostalgic as Richard Jeffries’ After London. It is also the only intelligent book ever written about the technological singularity. As disturbingly hyperreal as any Pre-Raphaelite painting, IF THEN imagines what the end of history really will really look like, what’s really at stake, and maybe, just maybe, what we can do about it.’