Safe Return Doubtful

British Literature – Published 2025

This is a post-apocalyptic novella that charts the journey of a young girl, Flo, as she searches for her brother, across an empty land, strewn only with the horrors of what remains, its inhabitants having fled from the apocalypse that has spread from the south. The premise may sound familiar, but this is a refreshingly different take, and completely captivating.

Those who have remained are affected in ways that seem bizarre and at first unclear, though the text begins to shed some light.

One of those ways is the altering of the written word. The account therefore, is in single syllables, a sort of deconstructed language that at first is off-putting. I set the book aside for a few days, and began again with a clearer frame of mind.

The resulting style has a rhythmic feel to it, and reads something like writing from the Beat Generation than modern literature, with broken and tangled words. This only serves to enhance the vision of a bewildering and often terrifying land, slowly decaying, regressing to a prehistoric state.

With a fresh approach, what had initially daunted soon became the novel’s strongest feature. It’s not 100 pages, but begs a second reading for many of its paragraphs, so beautiful is the language. There are a couple of breaks from the main plot which work less well, but Grandsen has to be admired for being bold enough to experiment and break the mould of what is expected from this sort of fiction.

The novel was the joint winner of the inaugural Queen Mary Small Press Fiction Prize last month.

My GoodReads score 5 / 5