
Like every non-World War II new release, this novel is set in a futuristic dystopia. An unnamed nation (presumably Britain; there are a lot of unnamed things in this book) has become a repressive totalitarian regime following events known only as “What happened, if it happened”. Obviously these events are not openly discussed, but the chronology gradually emerges: unrest in the Middle East as catalyst, escalated by social media, and culminating in the large-scale massacre of an unnamed race of people (apparently Jewish, but we don’t really know for sure until very late in the book).