Today I am very excited to host a guest post by Eli Allison, the debut author of new dystopian thriller Sour Fruit, which is out now.

The concept behind Sour Fruit is very cool – it’s set in a future hell hole known as Kingston. This ramshackle world is full of shady characters who’ll cut your throat as soon as look at you.

So over to Eli, who’s going to introduce us to this wacky, dangerous world…

Want to say a big thank you to Josh for hosting my twisted novel Sour Fruit, on this second spot of The After Party Book Blog Tour.

So I thought we could do a fabulous sneak-peek into the world of Kingston; the setting for my dark dystopian novel. Kingston is a rotting scrap yard of misery, a river city in a country plagued by yearly devastating floods. VOIDs (people deemed unworthy of British Citizenship) are forced to survive in this place, and they try to have forged a life out of a city that year by year is rotting away under their feet.

We are going to look closely at one area in particular and the best way to know a place is to know its stories. There is a character in Sour Fruit who collects and tells people the stories of Kingston. Here is one of their tales about The Body Quarter…

Jane
There was two Janes, one tall, one small, one dusted with freckles, the other pale as bridal silk, one who danced amongst rubble and bullet holes, the other that couldn’t breathe.

These two Janes never meet, although they were forever changed by the other. VOID Jane and Citizen Jane, two tiny bubbles racing to the surface.

Citizen Jane, small and pale liked to slide the days away picking daisies to make crowns for her doll. She grew up in a nest of love, two hummingbird parents who hovered around their only child. But all her days were almost gone, she’d never fly the nest, never fly at all. She was dying and all that was left was nearly gone.

But there was a place, a hurried whisper of a last chance. ‘Kingston,’ they were told, but it came at a price.

‘Any price,’ they said. ‘Any.’

Who wouldn’t burn the world to save their child? The parents were lucky it wasn’t the whole world that needed burning… Just one girl.

Silly VOID Jane had asked for help from the wrong aid worker; he wore his bright orange vest like he wore his smile; tight. The worker had taken her blood like he had taken everyone’s blood he helped. He filed VOID Jane’s picture, name and test results into his private files and with the stab of the enter button everyone’s fates were sealed.

Citizen Jane took her first good breath in years, her new lungs stretched wide. Her eyes opened to see a shiny white room her parents watching. Her mother embracing her doll, her father embracing his tears. They thanked the doctor, the nurse, the porter, everyone but the one person they should have.

They found VOID Jane’s body burnt in The Black Quay, but those that found her knew the hollowed out child had spent her last days in The Body Quarter, carved up for parts.

VOID Jane, tall and freckled would slide the days away, twirling, and leaping to music played through the tinny speakers of an old phone. She would wait hours at the Charge shop, to fill its little battery. Racing to find an old room, secret and long dead and she would place the phone tilted against rumble and hit play. She would dance in muted light, etching graceful lines into the dusty floor with pointed toes, her fingers outstretched reaching for the sky.

The End

Hope you liked the glimpse into the underbelly of Kingston. If you’d like to know more about Kingston then my book Sour Fruit is out now.

About the Author
Eli Allison tells people at parties that she’s a writer, but she mostly spends the day in her knickers swearing at the laptop. She ping-ponged between one depressing job until finally she said, ‘This year I’m writing that book.’ Years later the book is done…There is a sneaking suspicion she would have kept quiet had she known quite how long it would have taken her. She lives in Yorkshire, works in her head and does not enjoy long walks on the beach or anywhere, in fact she gets upset at having to walk to the fridge for cheese.

Find Eli on Twitter @EliAllison3

And visit her website at https://www.eli-allison.com/