“These co-writers have produced a vision of a blighted world where everyone has to make sacrifices for the greater good, personal happiness being the first thing to go.” – The Financial Times, listed as one of the best science fiction books of 2021 “A short, sharp shock of a book undeniably a powerfully told debut” – SFX Magazine (Cover design by Mark Ecob and Luise Roberts) Praise for The Offset Which parent will Miri pick to die: the one she loves, or the one she hates who is working to save the world? Days before their Offset ceremony where one of her mothers must be sentenced to death, she is brought back against her will following a run-in with the law. Has someone intervened to sabotage her life’s work? Meanwhile, her daughter Miri, an anti-natalist, has run away from home. But things aren’t working out and there are discrepancies in the data. Professor Jac Boltanski is leading Project Salix, a ground-breaking new mission to save the world by replanting radioactive Greenland with genetically modified willow trees. But in this world, survival demands sacrifice, so for every birth, there must be a death.

It is a rule that is simultaneously accepted, celebrated and abhorred. In a dying world, the Offset ceremony has been introduced to counteract and discourage procreation. It’s your eighteenth birthday and one of your parents must die.

Their first book together, The Offset, was published in September 2021. Emma researches contemporary representations of the Holocaust and has published work with T&T Clark and the Paulist Press. Natasha has done some things mentioned elsewhere on this site. Calder Szewczak is the alias of writing duo Natasha Calder and Emma Szewczak, who met while studying at Cambridge.

The Offset by Calder Szewczak