If you knew you had fifty-nine minutes until everything and everyone you love would be lost forever, what would you do with that time?
It's an ordinary evening. People are coming home from work, cooking dinner for their children, cuddling on sofas with their lovers. And then the message arrives, shattering everyone's worlds:
Missiles are set to destroy England in fifty-nine minutes. Everyone should seek immediate shelter.
59 minutes follows the journey of three women trying to make it home to and protect their families. The journeys should be simple, but with a lost schoolchild seeking help, a teenage daughter suddenly going missing, and dangerous criminals on the prowl, there is peril at every corner.
Review:
"It's a beautiful day for the world to end"
In this compulsive, terrifying tableau of real life, we follow Carrie, Frankie and Mrs Dabb when the alerts start to sound. And then the news comes; there's less than an hour until their world quite literally explodes and it's all over. They can pray for a hoax, a mistake, an accidental button being pushed but the world is falling apart anyway. Three perspectives at different points in their lives, dotted across the South Coast, looking forwards to different things and suddenly all equal in their fear of the unimaginable.
It's frantic, desperate, provocative - throwing us into the danger right from the first page and keeping that same feverish, quick pace despite the bulk of the book happening in, you guessed it, just 59 minutes. With perspective switching, minute by minute, edging closer to the end of the countdown; it captures that way that time freezes with fear and distils the strange, unexplainable beauty of everyday things that you can only appreciate when it's being threatened - creating a striking contrast between the desperate need to survive and a profound sense of hopelessness.
"To have a war museum, it suddenly strike Carrie, when war is so very present. What a ludicrous world."
When our 59 minutes are up, we walk headfirst into the fallout to experience the aftermath. I almost wanted it to end there, for a small moment I thought we didn't need the story to keep going and it lost a tiny amount of momentum but then I was captivated again by the clever writing and ready to get emotionally wrecked by the other bombs waiting to drop on me.
We follow our cast as they scramble through cities, trying to understand what's happening, searching for safety, looking for a way back to their loved ones through panic, darkness and chaos - creating perfectly woven individual tales that are destined to collide eventually through a shared fate. It delicately explores the complex, fragile dynamics of power, government and society as we watch it crumble within minutes with the intensity of an apocalyptic fantasy but with a very real threat from humans instead of aliens and ghosts.
An unbelievable clever, deeply moving showcase of the human potential for kindness, connection and monstrosity with an electrifyingly dark thrilling plot.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
- 59 Minutes publishes in ebook on September 25th 2025, hard copies to follow.
- I received a reviewers copy of this title in return for a review.
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