Fallout

A dazzling, defiant coming-of-age novel set against the backdrop of the Greenham Women’s Peace Camp—where punk, protest, and unexpected love collide. Warm, sharp, and quietly explosive--Fallout is the kind of novel readers pass to their friends, their sisters, and their book clubs, then can't stop talking about long after the final page.

It's the winter of 1982 and fifteen year old Bridget is already tired of being told how the world works. Her father is building a fallout shelter in the garden. Her mother is holding the family together with routines and silence. And at school, no one is saying anything that feels true. So when Bridget hears about the women camped outside a military base at Greenham Common--protesting nuclear missiles, refusing to leave, she goes. At first, it's just curiosity.

Then it's something else.

What she finds there isn’t just a camp, but a whole new world and a kind of love that rewrites every story she’s ever been told. Including her own. Because Greenham isn't what she expected. It's chaotic, alive, and full of women who don't ask permission. They argue, organise, clash, and care for each other in ways Bridget has never seen before. Here, the rules feel different. Looser. Sharper.

And the longer she stays, the harder it is to go home.

But nothing at Greenham is simple. Beneath the solidarity, tensions simmer. Voices collide. Loyalties shift. And as Bridget is pulled deeper into this volatile, exhilarating world, she begins to see cracks--not just in the movement, but in everything she thought she understood about family, power, and herself.

Because once you start asking questions, you can't always live with the answers.