Imprint
- Corsair
- Corsair
Fiction, Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)
Model Citizens is a subversive and darkly comic story of class, technology, and identity, offering a vision of the future that may be closer than we realise.
'It has the pace and dynamism of a thriller, the metaphysical curiosity of the best science fiction and some judiciously-planted charges of wry humour' The Herald
'A dazzling novel' Edmund Gordon, award-winning author
And how to tell what the best things were? Well, that was easy: the best things were the ones with the most people looking at them.
Alastair Buchanan has a comfortable life. It's been a year since he received his very own junior - a clone designed to help him escape the daily grind. So why does Alastair spend his days alone, online, obsessing over his status? When his long-term girlfriend Caitlin can't take it anymore, Alastair does his best to hold it together. But then, a remnant from his past appears and he is forced to confront the level of control that technology has over his life.
Elsewhere, an anti-tech terrorist cell dedicated to yanking humanity back to the 1990s is building momentum. And looming over everyone is Kim Larson, inventor of the juniors. But when Kim realises that humanity's future lies in the stars, who will be left to hold him to account?
From award-winning author Daniel Shand, Model Citizens explores a surreal world peopled by humans struggling with their dehumanising present. Full of suspense, it asks us what we give up when we exist online, and who we can trust to take care of us. Model Citizens is a subversive and darkly comic story of class, technology, and responsibility, offering a vision of the future that may be closer than we realise.
Praise for Model Citizens
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A terrific achievement. Taut and tense - the Guardian on Fallow
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I'm a sucker for a well-handled unreliable narrator - and this is the best one I've read in a while. Bleak; funny; alarming; sad; it works on so many levels, managing to be at the same time a road trip through Scotland, a modern Biblical parable and a tense psychological thriller with echoes of Iain Banks and Cormac McCarthy - Joanna Harris, author of Chocolat, on Fallow
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Model Citizens is a dazzling novel, combining the imaginative boldness and emotional clarity of Daniel Shand's previous work with a torrent of provocative ideas, and a tremendously broad satirical scope. This is fiction that's equal to the strange times ahead. - Edmund Gordon, author of award-winning The Invention of Angela Carter
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All this rich world-building constructs a framework for sharp questions about consciousness, identity and death, played out against the threat of an imminent and apocalyptic end to the comfortable, if pressured, existence Shand's characters have grown to depend on... [it has] the pace and dynamism of a thriller, the metaphysical curiosity of the best science fiction and some judiciously-planted charges of wry humour... his social commentary is funny and on target - The Herald
Daniel Shand
Daniel Shand's debut novel, Fallow, was published in 2016 and won the Betty Trask Prize. His second book, Crocodile, came out two years later and was shortlisted for the Encore Prize for Best Second Novel.
His short stories have been published in several magazines (New Writing Scotland, Gutter, 404 INK, Popshot) and he has read and led workshops at the Edinburgh International Book Festival and the Marlborough Literature Festival.
He won the University of Edinburgh Sloan Prize for fiction and the University of Dundee Creative Writing Award. In 2016, Daniel was the winner of the Saltire Society International Travel Bursary for Literature, and, in 2021, he was the Jessie Kesson Fellow at Moniack Mhor.
Daniel has lived in and around Edinburgh since 2011, where he teaches at Napier University.
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