One day I’m going to be checking out CNN on my lunch break and shriek “NOOO!”. Then my co-workers will turn around and wonder if I’ve lost my damn mind. And on that day I’m going to set a new land/space record for getting from the 3rd floor of Company X to the local library’s basement fiction section and dumping a stack of Fay Weldon novels on the checkout desk. Like it or not, Fay Weldon is in her EIGHTIES just like the heroine Frances in Chalcot Crescent.

If you’re read or at least heard of Fay Weldon you know she’s notorious for a razor sharp eye and wit. And she doesn’t hesitate to mine her own life for a fascinating tale. Chalcot Crescent, set as TV-Tropes.org calls Twenty Minutes Into The Future is Weldon’s imaging of what her younger sister would have been like if in reality Margaret Weldon hadn’t suffered a miscarriage when Fay was two years old.

The youngest Weldon sister Frances is clever, attractive and willing to do whatever she has to grab the things she wants in life even if it means a huge cost to her mother and sisters. In the Chalcot Crescent universe, Frances steals Fay’s lover and has his child and then goes onto to steal her first husband who was dating Fay. While Fay remains in the advertising world, Frances is the Weldon sister who becomes a best selling author and playwright who even in the depressing future still has a slight level of fame she leverages.

At it’s best Chalcot Crescent is a companion of sorts to Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood. Due to natural disasters and human meddling our world has slipped into The Other. Society is now controlled by Corporations and people are trying to exist. All three novels plunge you into a world that could be hovering right outside. And all three novels are must reads.