The Signal and the Silence: Lisa Marie Heitman-Bruce’s Glendarragh Code Offers a Stark, Lyrical Vision of the Post-Democratic Future
This review was written in exchange for a complimentary advance copy of the book.
Reviewed by N. Fenwick
For The Kodiak Girl Substack
In Glendarragh Code, her haunting and quietly defiant debut novel, Lisa Marie Heitman-Bruce arrives with a voice at once elegiac and urgent, weaving a tale of collective resistance and intimate ruin amid a post-democratic United Kingdom. The book opens not with a gunshot but with a whisper of a world unraveling slowly, beautifully, fatally. It’s less The Hunger Games and more Station Eleven by way of The Handmaid’s Tale, though even those comparisons do little justice to the novel’s ferocious interiority and grave lyricism.
If Margaret Atwood cautioned us about power, and Emily St. John Mandel about collapse, Heitman-Bruce warns us about compliance and the slow erosion of the self beneath convenience, data, and fear. Glendarragh Code isn’t a manifesto. It’s a requiem - and reckoning.
A Nation Shuttered
The novel is set in the not-so-distant year 2032, after Britain has quietly become something unrecognizable. There is no great cataclysm, no alien invasion, no civil war. What there is instead is data compliance: citizens sorted, judged, and erased through predictive algorithms and biometric infrastructure. Neighborhoods disappear into spreadsheets. People vanish into “category non-essential.” In the novel’s prologue - a dense, allusive piece of prose poetry - the cities fall, not to bombs, but to bandwidth. It is one of the most arresting openings of recent dystopian fiction:
“The ultimate cruelty was not violence. It was irrelevance. No one murdered them; instead, a slow, glacial deletion, devoid of ceremony or even hatred, consigned them to oblivion.”
It’s difficult not to feel the chill of Orwell here, but where 1984 raged at totalitarianism, Glendarragh Code mourns the people who stopped noticing it. It’s not Big Brother that kills the future; it’s the passive acceptance of platforms, apps, cameras, and convenience. It is a story about the architecture of soft power.
The Village of the Ghosts
The title Glendarragh Code refers to a remote Scottish village where the story unfolds through an ensemble of characters drawn together by survival, memory, and something that feels like fragile hope. There is Mairi Douglas, a former nurse who once scanned patients into biometric systems and now lives with the guilt of that complicity. Her niece, Sorcha, is a tech-savvy recluse fleeing a past coded in metadata and machine learning. There’s Alec, the quiet mechanic with a patriot’s heart and a veteran’s caution. There is Morven, the shopkeeper turned ration keeper, Callum the widower, and Ewan, a former academic-turned-cartographer of collapse.
In less careful hands, this would read like a stock cast from post-apocalyptic central casting. But Heitman-Bruce writes each one not just as a character but as a full psychological geography. We know their losses. We feel their silence. And crucially, we see how they come to trust - slowly, painfully, without flourish. This novel is not about heroes, but about the slow work of resisting.
Each chapter toggles between these perspectives, and Heitman-Bruce’s control of voice and pacing is masterful. Her prose is spare but poetic, unflinching without descending into melodrama. In describing winter, she writes:
“The snow softened every edge, stilled every motion. Even time felt slower, caught under the same hush as the land.”
These are not merely beautiful sentences, they are acts of world-building through tone, each phrase thickening the air of a place where people survive not through grand acts, but through watching each other’s backs.
Style as Signal
Stylistically, Glendarragh Code is ambitious. The book opens in an almost fragmented dystopian voice. While initially disorienting, it becomes clear that language itself is a casualty of control.
This technique may alienate some readers in the early pages, but patience is rewarded: the style smooths as the narrative transitions from abstraction to place, from theory to character. When Sorcha and Mairi appear in Wick and later Glendarragh, the language resolves itself. The shift is intentional, metaphorical: we are descending from the algorithmic into the human.
At its best, the prose vibrates with lyric clarity. At its worst, it can verge on the overwrought. There are moments when metaphor stacks on metaphor until the line buckles beneath its own weight. But even these excesses feel honest, the mark of a writer aiming for depth in a genre that too often flattens feeling for plot.
Political Fiction Without Preaching
Dystopian fiction often falls into two traps: didacticism or nihilism. Heitman-Bruce avoids both. Glendarragh Code is deeply political. Its central metaphor is compliance culture turned lethal. But it never reduces its themes to slogans. It understands that tyranny does not always arrive in obvious ways, and that oppression today is more likely to wear the face of “efficiency,” “public safety,” or “terms and conditions.”
There is a clear critique here of surveillance capitalism, algorithmic governance, and digital erasure, but it is delivered through the lives of people, not polemic. One of the book’s most harrowing moments comes when Mairi, in a moment of emotional confession, reveals:
“I made people scan... I told myself it was temporary. That it wasn’t my call.”
It is these confessions - quiet, unheroic - that anchor the novel’s ethical gravity. The book’s antagonists are not faceless villains, but systems so totalizing that resistance begins not in revolution, but in memory.
The Ghost Network
Much of the book’s tension revolves around the village’s decision to become “ghosts” - to drop out of the digital grid entirely. Phones are dismantled. Communications go analog. Antennas are rerouted. Fake signals are broadcast to mislead predictive algorithms.
In another author’s hands, this might lead to a cinematic shootout or viral rebellion. But Heitman-Bruce stays grounded. The climax is emotional, not explosive. The signal that changes everything is not a call to war. The question is not “Can we win?” but “Can we remain human?”
This philosophical quietness is the novel’s greatest risk and its greatest reward. There are no easy answers. The resistance does not promise victory, only integrity. In a culture hungry for spectacle, Glendarragh Code offers something more dangerous: contemplation.
A Feminist Ethics of Survival
There is a soft feminism that undergirds Glendarragh Code, less in ideology than in ethic. The story privileges care over combat, presence over performance. The women in the novel do not carry swords; they carry soup pots, notebooks, tools, and secrets. They watch, hold, build, and remember. Even the act of bartering - a repeated motif - is portrayed not as desperation, but as mutuality.
This is not to say that the men are sidelined. On the contrary, characters like Alec and Ewan are richly drawn, offering different modes of masculinity. They are stoic, analytical, and sometimes tender. But the heart of the book belongs to women who lead not with dominance, but with conviction.
That the village’s rebirth begins not with a gun, but with a question: What do we promise?
A Caution, Not a Comfort
Glendarragh Code is not a comforting read. It is not meant to be. But it is never gratuitous. The novel’s darkness is leavened by the light of small acts: someone boiling tea, someone fixing something broken, someone remembering a story.
The world it imagines feels terrifyingly plausible. Its cities fall not to bombs but to predictive models. Its citizens vanish not in mass arrests but in spreadsheets. Its heroes do not storm bunkers; they print maps. In an age where the average person is sorted, scanned, and scored a hundred times a day, Glendarragh Code forces us to ask: What is the cost of convenience?
And more importantly: What remains of us when the system fails?
Final Verdict
Lisa Marie Heitman-Bruce has crafted a novel of unusual depth and grace, one that operates as both a warning and a balm. Glendarragh Code is the kind of dystopian fiction we need now: not just a world-ending thriller, but a quiet, searing meditation on identity, memory, and collective refusal.
This is not a debut that seeks to impress with spectacle. It seeks instead to endure. And in that, it succeeds. Readers of speculative fiction should watch what Heitman-Bruce does next, she’s building something quietly revolutionary.
Highly recommended.
- N. Fenwick