These few chapters really have me wanting to read this book. It’s good so far and have my attention. Definitely going to check this book out!

I was so excited to start reading 84K ...I delved into this book with high expectations and was disappointed that i would have to buy the whole book - due to only having access to a few chapters. But no need to worry...what i read made my head spin...30 pages of wondering what was going on. I still couldn't tell you... but i am so glad that experience is over as i have no desire to read anymore.

I am not able to provide a review because the publisher provided a five-chapter excerpt but then declined my request for a full copy.

While I only got the first five chapters I did like what I read! I love this author and honestly have read and owned pretty much everything written! I can't wait to finish this story!

This excerpt was really hard for me to get into and enjoy. I was not drawn into the material and did not enjoy reading it. I do not think I want to read the rest of the book. I found it confusing, and am starting to no longer enjoy reading dystopian materials. The author seems to be a strong writer though.

I purchased the full novel elsewhere. I didn't want to just read the provided first five chapters. :)

84K by Claire North
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really had to debate between giving this a full five stars or the four, but ultimately it all boils down to whether or not the heavily ambitious tale was pulled off in spectacular flavor or whether it must remain a disquieting tale with an end that will either leave a bittersweet taste in your mouth or leave you anxious.

I personally think it'll be a bit of both.

I'm reminded of a bit of Les Miserables and a bit of Charles Dickens in this one, which is either odd or awesome when you consider that this is a high-concept SF dystopia where everything boils down to a price tag.

Lives, crimes... ANYTHING can be paid for. If you're unproductive, it's much easier just to liquidate the asset. Namely, you. Pay the blood price. And if you're rich enough, then anything can be had. It's the ultimate capitalist nightmare.

Fine. We've had stories like this before. Even recently. But here's where Claire North really shines. She never rests on any kind of concept. She dives deep, retaining a lyrical air with complex and satisfying novel structures that focus more on telling highly personal and emotional thematic threads for her characters. Linear storytelling is not a high priority.

And in that respect, she has a lot of giant storytellers' shoulders to stand on. She's carrying on a very creative and complex tradition and owning it for the SF community. For that, I must applaud. :)

For this tale, however, we go from apathy and invisibility to the realization that the MC has had it all wrong the entire time, that missed opportunities and reveals such as his high-school flame having his child and he never even knew... and especially in this world... would have truly nasty consequences. Especially when that old flame is murdered. She was worth only a measly 84k.

After that, it's a tale worthy of a mighty revenge couched in the simple statement that he will find his daughter.

Usher in some truly horrific worldbuilding, degradation, gruesome deaths, and revolution, all the while seeing how the other side lives... and dies... and we've got something quite epic. Without quite feeling epic.

The MC's quest is monomythical. Nothing else matters. The pendulum has swung.

The resolution is fascinating and complex and not easily digestible. Everyone seems to have a hard time living in this world. There are no easy fixes. This is not a place for heroes.

I would not expect any readers to come away feeling happy... but that's not the purpose of this tale. It's meant to make you think. And it does that in spades.

Not a traditional blockbuster, right? Right. And that may be its ultimate strength.

84K begins in medias res: Neila is on the towpath of a canal on the outskirts of London, trying to call an ambulance. A man called Theo Miller lies beaten and bloodied, a severe head wound sending him in and out of coherence. The ambulance won’t come—Neila doesn’t have insurance and doesn’t know if Theo does—and she resolves to leave him. She doesn’t, in the end. She brings him onto her boat, the Hector, which she plies up and down the canals, eking out a meager living. Later, when he revives enough to hold a halting conversation, she almost apologizes for saving him; it is not the done thing. But there’s a code on the water, she says, though no one much respects it anymore.

You’d take it for the rueful complaints of someone from an older generation—kids these days—but it soon becomes clear Theo and Neila inhabit a grim dystopia where everything has a price, including respect and compassion, and those are dear commodities indeed. 84K treads back and forth through the life of the man sometimes known as Theo Miller, through the history of this deepening corporatocratic state. Theo was 22 when England abolished human rights. It wasn’t long after when the criminal justice system, the press, and the university system withered as well. What were once a web of corporations and the civil institutions beholden to them has become The Company, and everyone’s worth is now dictated by a corporate schema.

The man called Theo works for the Criminal Audit Office, which assigns a monetary value to criminal acts. (Prison was deemed “deeply inefficient,” and replaced with a system of monetary fines.) Manslaughter costs this much for the perpetrator, with discounts if the victim was a low-value person—a drain on the system—like a child with autism or an immigrant. Rape can be dickered down to sexual harassment if the victim can’t cough up the money for a DNA test. Dings for small things, like paperwork infractions, can accrue to insurmountable sums. If the perpetrator can’t pay, they end up assigned to what is colloquially known as the “patty lines,” so named after the first penal jobs making hamburger patties. This is not a good life.

At a corporate retreat that is ostensibly voluntary (and semi-comically horrific), Theo runs into Dani, a woman whom he’s known since childhood, since before he was called Theo Miller. He spends the next week waiting for the arrest, until Dani finds him again. She demands he help her find her lost daughter, who was raised in a “care home” after Dani lost custody. The home changed the girl’s name to Lucy Rainbow Princess, and rented her out to make commercials. (Care isn’t cheap, and the pay was just enough to keep the children from malnutrition, unless it wasn’t.) Theo has spent his adult life doing everything he can to avoid attracting attention, but he determines to do what little he can to find Dani’s lost daughter. The attraction it draws is almost as terrifying as what Dani can say to unmask him, and helping her will draw him into a conspiracy he’d rather ignore, with a price higher than either of them can pay, even with their lives. The world Theo inhabits could never be described as a good one, but it can, and will, get a whole lot worse. (After all, we know from the first page he will end up near dead at that edge of the canal.)

84K’s title deliberately invokes 1984, in the same oblique way as Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 nods to George Orwell’s dystopian classic. But the dystopia Claire North builds here is a uniquely British one, with callbacks and allegiances to everything from Brave New World to The Children of Men (the author is British, and more widely read across the pond). Even in our existing world (whether it qualifies as a dystopia or not depending on your point of view), the neighborhoods and waterways of London and its surrounding communities are laid out like a map of the social order. (As a visiting American, I may not know what living in Battersea means, but I can understand the social geography involved.) Though 84K is clearly part of a tradition, I don’t mean to imply it’s some humdrum regurgitation; it has its own unique voice. The narration is deliberately off-putting, written in a form of stream of consciousness that sometimes requires you to double back, or just let go and flow forward.

Unlike Orwell’s Winston, we’re not exactly meant to identify with the man known as Theo Miller. At first blush, he’s more like corporate drone Bernard Marx from Brave New World, but worse, because it seems like he’s chosen to become a coward and a cypher. But North is doing something like the opposite of playing on your emotions; she’s daring you to find compassion in a world that commodifies everything. This is a challenging novel, with an uncomfortable protagonist written in a way that’s distancing and divisive. You’re going to have to work for it, and what it’s worth is no easy equation. Not like life and death in this near future, where everything has a price.

I read the first five chapters excerpt of this book, and I don’t think I will be reading the rest. The writing is disjointed, and I understand that it is a stylistic choice, but I am not enjoying it. The story did not draw me in, and I can already tell that it would be difficult to be pulled into and would take a while, if ever.

This book is a total and complete mess. The first five chapters are confusing, muddled, poorly written, and unintelligible.

An editor really should have had another look at this before publication.

I've only read the first 5 chapters but I'm intrigued - lots of questions and engaging characters to hook the reader. I'm keen to read the rest of the novel and I'm hopeful that the style and tone remain the same.

I enjoyed these five chapters so, so much. I feel that Claire North may be a genre-defying and defining author for dystopian. We really need to change this genre because the tropes are frustrating. But in just five chapters, Ms North convinced me that we can have a new George Orwell.

I'm looking forward to having my request for the full book accepted.

This is a preview of only the first five chapters, but it sets up an excellent premise in a not too distant possible future, where the UK is run by a corporation outright, rather than by a democratic government. North's writing style seems much clearer than in her previous work "The End of The Day" and I have high hopes for a fascinating look at the loss of human rights mingled with the increase of the rights of corporations.

I only read the first five chapters of this book, but I am hooked! 84K seems to be set in the future, where human rights have been abolished, and people can simply pay off their crimes. Getting away with murder in this new society seems relatively easy, given you have enough money. One of the characters, Theo, works in a department where he is tasked with billing people for the crimes they have committed. However, he seems to be hiding a secret, as he's waiting around waiting to be arrested. That is, until another character, Dani, appears and wants to talk to Theo. What is their conversation about? What is really happening in this society? You'll have to read to find out!

I read an excerpt of 84K and I have to say, I am very intrigued to finish this one. It has a really interesting premise and I enjoyed the writing style. I was getting 1984 vibes with a fresh, updated twist. This is definitely one that is going on my reading list.

This sample was definitely enough to whet my appetite for the full book. While the style of the very immediate opening left me a little unsure, once we get flashbacks to Theo's life and teasers about how very wrong society has gone after the abolition of the Human Rights Act, for instance, I was left massively intrigued. Thankfully I don't have long to get my hands on the full story!

I requested the first five chapters of this book because the plot sounded interesting an right up my typical reading alley. However, I could absolutely not get into this book. The first chapters seemed to ramble, and I was left utterly confused and unable to get into the story. Will likely try again with the full text at a later time.

We request the first five chapters of this book because it seems to be making the rounds on book twitter and we were intrigued. But the first five chapters didn't click for us. We felt confused and unsure as to what was going on... however, we don't think that it's the book's fault. We think it's an it's me not you type thing. Particularly an it's me right now, in this moment, not you type thing. So, we'll probably pick it up someday in the future I'm physical copy.

Promising start. The description sounds interesting and the first 5 chapters had me hooked. I can't wait to read the full book!

New from Claire North, 84k promises (if this extremely intriguing excerpt proves trustworthy) to be extraordinary.

It's only five chapters, but this dystopian world of the not too distant future springs to life fully formed - while leaving enough as yet unsaid to provide a tantalizing glimpse of a future where corporate is king.

Oh wow. I received the first five chapters from Netgalley, and I love it. The prose is hypnotic and the dystopian world is scarily credible. I just want to go on reading. Here’s hoping I’m able to get my hands on the full thing. This looks incredible!