They are the Family, all of them together, and every year everyone wakes at the same time for three days of ‘Virsry’ celebrations, to remember the time that their first parents came to Eden, and to publicly tell the stories of their past. People have clustered into different settlements, each of which wakes and sleeps at a different time from the others, to make protection and hunting easier. John is only young – a ‘newhair’, what we’d call an adolescent – but he chafes at the rules laid down by those around him. John Redlantern is one of these, and his questioning and challenging will push the entire history of Eden in a new direction, changing the world forever. But not everyone is content to simply sit and wait and trust. They do their best to keep the stories of their ancestors alive, and to remember how they came to be in this inhospitable place, believing that one day help will come from Earth to rescue them. They are all descendants of two people, Angela Young and Tommy Schneider, survivors of a space mission almost two hundred years before.

Beckett’s story takes place on Eden, a strange and exotic world where a small cluster of some five hundred people struggle to survive in the heart of an alien forest. It wasn’t love at first sight: I was initially put off by the mannered language, but its rhythms soon wormed their way into my mind and even into my dreams. I’ve recently found it hard to ‘click’ with books, but was thrilled to become deeply, voraciously engaged with Chris Beckett’s Dark Eden trilogy: a series which asks us to think about what it means to be human, about the stories that we tell one another, and about the way that civilisations develop. One good thing about travelling for work (as I have been for the past week) is that it gives me lots of time to read.

Chris beckett eden trilogy