The Feed audiobook

Book Reviewed by Stacey on www.whisperingstories.comI started reading this book a few months ago, unfortunately, due to time constraints I had to put it to one side for a while as it wasn’t really a book I could dip in and out of – I know I tried – As the story was quite complex, for me anyway. Whilst I love Dystopian fiction some elements felt quite Sci-Fiy (is that even a word) and Sci-Fi isn’t something I read often, hence I needed to concentrate on the book.The story begins in the not too distant future in a world where people are connected to ‘The Feed’, they do most things via it, including communicate with one another – Even when sat facing each other, spoken language is rarely used. You can see another person’s fears, worries, memories, loves, just about everything about another person via The Feed. Just think of today’s social media but with the ability to see into the person you are connecting with. This has been happening for years and is a way of life.However, one day The Feed goes offline. Imagine a world where people don’t know how to communicate with one another, let alone speak out loud. There is also another scary element to The Feed disappearing, it is easily hijacked and people are vanishing in their sleep, so when you sleep someone has to watch over you.The Feed is one amazing book set in a world where people don’t know how to be just like we are in today’s society. Imagine if the internet vanished and you couldn’t access anything via the web anymore, how would life exist, how would businesses exist. Imagine that scenario but with a more serious element to it, you or someone you love could easily be taken by someone or something hijacking the now dead internet. Quite scary to think about.This is a book that makes you think, not only about the future but about the use and quite often overuse of technology today. It is full of surprises and twists and turns. It did feel a little slow to get going, but once past the first couple of chapters the pace picked up and the book came alive. The characters all fitted together perfectly and whilst the premise of disappearing in your sleep might seem a little far-fetched, the bonding and behaviour of the cast made this book perfectly realistic.It’s hard to believe reading this novel that it is written by a debut author, the writing is that good. If you love Dystopian fiction then this is a book for you. Also, I believe that there will soon be a TV series based on the book. I hope that they keep to the plot and do the book justice. I for one will be watching it.

**5 Goodreads Stars** "Who did you first share your thoughts with? It was the most intimate feeling, wasn't it? Nothing between you, no way to lie, just pure and perfect thinking. All of us, plaited together.""The space we create, that we forge with our lives - that's what we have to protect. We work hard for such an inconsequential space, but it is absolutely everything to us." Nick Clark Windo's The Feed is a beautifully written, darkly intense dystopian novel concerning the future of humankind in a technology saturated world. Imagine if Twitter and Facebook were implanted in your brain; you could access non-stop thoughts, memories, and newsfeeds of everyone in the entire world. This is the world in which  The Feed is set, and this is what "the Feed" refers to. It isn't hard to envision our world moving in that direction in the not so distant future. Despite the draw and addicting allure of "the Feed," there are some citizens who don't like it. They are known as the "Resistors," people who have reverse engineered or reverse biohacked their implants, including such things as microphones in one's lip. They have physically cut out the implants from their bodies to avoid "the Feed."The book begins with Tom and Kate, a couple who have strong feelings about "the Feed." Tom is adamantly opposed to it despite the fact his father and brother, Ben, were the creators of it. Kate enjoys the fanfare of the "Feed," as she is essentially what we would consider a viral YouTuber in her world. She has lots of followers, and experiences endorphin rushes when they share or praise her content. When "the Feed" is hacked by an unknown group, society as Kate and Tom know it collapses. Think Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and Cormac McCarthy's The Road collapse. It's bad, and what makes it worse is that most of the world has become so reliant on "the Feed" to tell them what to do that they have no clue how to do the most quotidian things. All information has been digitized. Physical books are obsolete. Medications and products are marked with QR codes rather than text describing their contents and use. If you needed to know how to cook a meal, you pull it up on "the Feed." The Feed's absence renders most people helpless, leaving few people and little knowledge left to rebuild the world. Even language and vocalization have to be rediscovered, as most people communicated through their minds via "the Feed."The hacking of "the Feed" has also caused a mysterious illness infecting millions of people across the globe. This illness only comes on at night while people are sleeping, which means that someone always has to stay up watching their friend or family member for signs of infection. The infection causes people's personalities to dramatically change to point that they often kill or attack their friends or family members. The only way to "cure" this illness is to kill the infected person. It only infects people with "the Feed" implants, so Resistors without implants have slowly been taking over civilization.I'll admit it took me a few days to really get into this book. This is because the book's world is so rich and intricate that you have to memorize and learn lots of new vocabulary/terms. This is what makes the book so successful, though. Once you get into the book's brave new world, you find yourself enmeshed in its uniqueness. Once I got 25% of the way through the book, I could not put it down. There are so many unexpected, exciting twists and turns in this book, but they make sense within the context of the story and the characters' personalities and motivations. There were a few moments at the beginning of the book where I felt like I was reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road, but I mean that as a compliment. To close,  The Feed  provides timely, apt criticism of our digitally infused world. It encourages the reader to reflect upon the potential long term social and environmental consequences of a digitally connected and digitally addicted world. For those of you who are already itching to get a copy of The Feed, you'll have to wait until March 13, 2018. I can assure you, however, that it is definitely worth the wait. Thank you to the author, Nick Clark Windo, the publisher, HarperCollins, and Edelweiss for providing me with an advanced ready copy of  The Feed .

The prologue of The Feed is a snapshot of future society just as it begins to crumble. As they spend the evening in a restaurant, Tom is trying to persuade his wife Kate to switch off her Feed, if only for a few minutes. The Feed is an invention that's transformed human life, making it possible for everyone to be permanently plugged in to a neverending stream of information and communication, augmenting everything about what one experiences in reality. (Advertisements, for example, no longer exist in the physical world. There are just 'quickcodes' which cause relevant ads to display to anyone who looks at them – as long as they're connected to the Feed, but then everyone is except extremist Resisters.) The characters' conversation is interrupted by a shockwave spreading around them as the same scene is beamed into everyone's Feed. The President has been assassinated; it's the beginning of the end.Six years later, we find Tom, Kate and their daughter Bea living alongside a handful of other survivors. Thousands died when the Feed collapsed, and those who remain are damaged, often confused, and lacking in many of the skills needed to create a self-sufficient community. There's also the threat of being 'taken', when a hacker hijacks one's mind using the old biological hardware required to make the Feed work. These characters have been left in relative peace so far – but then two of the group are taken in quick succession, and Bea disappears, prompting Tom and Kate to set out across the ravaged country in the hope of finding her.Inevitably, when I read stories like this, I find their settings and contexts and technology – their worlds – far more interesting than whatever the characters are doing. And Nick Clark Windo has put a lot of worldbuilding into The Feed; I could have quite happily read about life both pre- and post-collapse all day. There are tons of details to get your teeth into as Tom and Kate traverse a landscape made strange by loss and decay, shaped by desperation and the art of making do with what's left. Scenes like those with the spiked van, the Pharmacist and the 'human animal' will haunt me for a while.Where the book stumbles is in the construction of its characters. I disliked both Tom and Kate, and I couldn't get a sense of their bond with Bea, or care about their quest to find her. When you find yourself thinking 'I wouldn't be bothered if any or all of these people died', it's... usually a bad sign. BUT! Halfway through, there's a monumental, genius twist that changes everything. I can't say any more than that without spoiling it.The Feed lacks the humanity of Station Eleven, which the blurb (naturally) compares it to. It reminded me more of a cross between Louise Welsh's No Dominion and Liam Brown's Broadcast. If carefully constructed future worlds matter more to you than likeable characters, you'll get a lot of enjoyment out of this. And at least the ending is almost on a par with Gone Girl as far as 'awful outcomes for awful people' go.I received an advance review copy of The Feed from the publisher through NetGalley.TinyLetter | Twitter | Instagram | Tumblr

Actual rating 3.75/5 stars.The Feed has access to every memory and every particle of knowledge you and the whole world possesses. The Feed knows how you shop and what to sell you. The Feed allows conversations to be transferred in milliseconds and conveys them from only the face and body you want others to see.But then The Feed becomes corrupted and the whole world falls prey to a silent killer. There is now only a black hole where once everything humans had become was contained. Without access to every aspect of the world at their fingertips humans must relearn how to interact with each other and how to construct a new life for themselves from the debris of what remains.This was such an intriguing concept and a unique take on the post-apocalyptic trope. The inclusion of this high-tech failure was a scarily real-feeling addition. I loved learning about the world before, so familiar to our own where humans resided in social media bubbles separate to the physical world surrounding them. It was painted in sharp contrast to the dog-eat-dog atmosphere grown from the bones of this seemingly infinite yet utterly defeated world, which Windo invites us to enter long after its initial destruction.The humans who we meet there are shells of who they were before it. Everything from memories to simple words and phrases now escape them, so little used is the muscle of their brain, which often culminated in poignant and distressing scenes that focused on grief and the loss of the past but also the inability to both process or separate from it.The social commentary expose, for our own contemporary times, was obvious. We have lost touch of humanity as we seek to become ever more robotic in our everyday encounters. The ease of interactions unspooled directly from one brain into another can not compare to the lost art of slow conversation and the discovery of who we truly are along the way.Despite being utterly enamoured in discovering this new world and being shocked to speechlessness with the mid-way plot twist, this was a little unsatisfying in its conclusion. I had questions I felt deserved answers and the world we explored much of, in geographical terms, still felt a little barren to me in other areas. I appreciated all this did but also was looking for a more permanent conclusion or answers on how to escape the horrors of the past (and just what exactly they were) which were all hinted at in less concrete terms than I ultimately would have liked.

O înfricoșătoare distopie care va fi în curând adaptată de studiourile Amazon. Feedul este de fapt un dispozitiv implantat în interiorul corpului oamenilor (bebelușilor le este implantat încă de când se află în uterul mamei), cu ajutorul căruia pot comunica unii cu alții în timp real, pot accesa instantaneu orice informații, citi orice, călători oriunde, scrie mesaje, internet/om/computer într-un singur trup.Numai că problemele omenirii încep odată cu Prăbușirea Feedului, când oamenii încep să fie „locuiți” de entități misterioase, care le răpesc mințile și-i transformă în cu totul altcineva. Încet, încet, se instaurează haosul și în doar șase ani omenirea regresează la stadiul de nomazi care nu mai știu nici măcar să vorbească așa cum trebuie.Așa este când ești cu totul și cu totul dependent de tehnologie, asta și fiind de fapt tema principală a romanului: dependența noastră prea mare față de tehnologia din ce în ce mai performantă.Ritm alert și nu prea, capitole de sute de pagini, pagini sfâșietoare, dublate de introspecții prelungi și amintiri disparate, cu ajutorul cărora reușim să reconstituim și noi, alături de personaje, ce s-a întâmplat atunci, în timpul Prăbușirii, ce anume a dus la Prăbușire și cum și-ar putea reveni omenirea.

The Feed does not create any physical sensation, its an implant, bio-tech with no battery source, the human is the power source.And then…A collapseall feeds stoppeddevastation upon the earthpeople scatteredsome survivors and some takenthe characters within this tale on the road in search for food and ways to bring back vegetation and then in search for the ones taken.This barren devastation upon earth has the reader immersed within the story in a world with all that comes with survival and moving forward the story visceral, panoramic, and pastoral with clear telling before the reader.This would appeal to readers who have liked Swan Song by Robert McCammon, The Stand by Stephen King, and The Road by Cormac Mccarthy. This has some good story, nice clear prose may not be as big as opus as some other great tales with similar subject matter but just as captivating, a modest tale in world gone topsy turvy, moral lines crossed and abuses upon the earth reaped upon the denizens of earth, an encompassing narrative that captivates the reader with the fates of a few souls and the earth as a whole in the need of finding things, truths, lost, and the taken.“…and for a long time we didn’t realise it was happening. So many people were taken, and there was no way of knowing. Because everyone looked the same, right? But these normal-looking people suddenly started doing bad things. Very bad things. Killing other people. Destroying buildings, power stations, trying to disrupt the airports. They killed the president. We didn’t know who was themselves and who was someone else. It was…terrible. They did awful things they’d never otherwise have done. But we realised people were being taken over in their sleep. So it became law: never to sleep alone, never to sleep unwatched. And..there were signs we had to look for. It stopped being a law that you couldn’t…Basically, Bea, if you saw someone being taken, it wasn’t against the law to…”“At ground level, they enter streets where disorder rules: the devastation is random, it seems. Sometimes single houses are gutted while their neighbours are pristine. Walls have crumpled into the road and entire blocks have been razed. Scraps of building point up like blackened broken teeth. One mound of rubble is mixed with twisted metal. A plane? A Satellite? Something hurled down from the sky. Everywhere the trees are unruly, their branches grown too low, too wide, freed and controlled no more. Grass sprays up between the paving slabs. Down here on the ground, away from the super-loads, everywhere Tom looks lie bones. Some still snag tendrils of fabric, or maybe it’s matter, but most are sun-stripped clean. Sometimes there are recognisable configurations: two attaching at a knee; a ribcage like a spider; vertebrae with the jawbone attached. Pieces of people discarded like toys.”https://more2read.com/review/the-feed-by-nick-clark-windo/

Dit was een heel bijzonder boek. Wat gebeurt er als (een vergevorderde / futuristische versie van) sociale media opeens uit de wereld verdwijnt? Als de mens terug op haar instinct moet vertrouwen?The Feed was geen gemakkelijk boek om te lezen, voornamelijk door het gebrek aan hoofdstukken. Daarnaast duurt het een tijdje voordat de post-apocalyptische setting wordt toegelicht. Maar dan gebeuren er opeens heel spannende en onverwachte dingen. Rond pagina 190 was ik echt even in shock. Ook het einde is zeer sterk. Dit boek is zo’n mindfuck en tegelijkertijd heel actueel. Je moet even doorzetten aan het begin, maar dan staat je een hele bijzondere leeservaring te wachten.Mijn complete recensie lees je op Oog op de Toekomst.

As always this review can also be found on my blog The Tattooed Book Geek: https://thetattooedbookgeek.wordpress...I received a free copy of this book courtesy of the publisher in exchange for an honest review.The Feed starts with a prologue set before the collapse and focuses on Tom and Kate, the two main characters. Tom and Kate are going ‘slow‘ completely disconnected from the Feed, talking in the real, which doesn’t happen when you are connected to the Feed as it is that immersive, your whole life plugged in to and controlled by the Feed. It’s an innocuous beginning with Tom and Kate who are a married couple and who are just trying to spend some quality time together. Until the Feed is hacked and then something catastrophic happens that sets in motion the collapse of the Feed and subsequently, society on a whole.After the prologue, we jump forward 6 years and it’s about survival and coping in the aftermath of the collapse. Kate and Tom, their child, Bea, Graham and Jane who never had the Feed (they were resistors), Sean, Jack (Sean’s son) and Danny make up the group at the beginning. It’s a small community akin to a farming community, foraging, trying to grow crops and generally, keeping a low profile and getting by in the best way that they can. With the loss of knowledge and machinery, the way of life and living has reverted back to a more basic level. Food and resources are dwindling and it’s a daily struggle to survive.The Feed was all-encompassing and then it was gone, it was like an addiction, constantly streaming everything, all the time and now 6 years later, after it’s gone, people still suffer from Feed reflexes. When they try to remember things they inadvertently try to access memories, strands and streams from the Feed and they can’t, there’s nothing there, just an empty void and this causes them to start fitting, withdrawal symptoms from Feed addiction. At the start of the collapse, Feed reflexes were the cause of most people’s deaths as they couldn’t connect to the Feed. Where before they had a whole virtual world there was now nothing, they became lost in an oblivion of emptiness, the Feed reflexes took over as the synapses tried to connect over and over and over failing each time and they just didn’t know how to function like people in the real world.Sleep is the major danger for our cast of characters and you have to be watched by someone else when you sleep in case you are taken. Being ‘taken‘ means that your body is taken over and is the main factor that helped bring about the collapse of the Feed network and society. It happens quickly, in a matter of seconds, you start twitching in your sleep and then you are no longer you. You will look and sound the same but the person inside won’t be you, another will be tethered to you, your memories, what makes you, you, all gone and replaced with someone else. You have to be watched while you sleep otherwise how would the people around you know that when you awake, you are still you, they wouldn’t and then, they wouldn’t be able to trust you. There is no cure or remedy to being taken and the only solution is to kill the taken person before they become a danger and a threat.Everything was on the Feed, everything that made you, you. Your thoughts, your feelings, your emotions, your memories and you could even back-up your brain. The Feed took over from reality, you didn’t need to learn anything in the real world as you had the virtual world at the tip of your fingers. You could access the required information on the Feed in the blink of an eye, as soon as you thought it, the information that you wanted would be there right before you. Due to this, when the Feed went down a vast swathe of irreplaceable knowledge and information was lost.The first part of the Feed is quite slow, there’s a couple of action-orientated moments but on the whole, the beginning is rather sedated and measured and it takes over a hundred pages for Bea to finally be abducted. The slower pacing feels right for that first part of the story though and it works extremely well. It’s measured but at the same time engaging and it gives Windo the chance to ramp up the tension, explain the danger of sleep and being taken, build the world and allow you, as the reader a chance to become acquainted with the characters that he has created.After Bea has been abducted the pacing picks up. There’s lots of walking in the Feed, the book is a journey as Tom and Kate search for Bea. It’s a journey filled with twists, turns and revelations. Some you will see coming and others will blindside you.There’s only so much that you can do with a post-apocalyptic setting, after all, it’s a world gone to ruin. But, in The Feed, Windo has created an atmospheric, desolate and brutal world. The remnants of the past are vividly realised, it’s a bleak, barren and dangerous post-feed world that the characters now inhabit and it comes alive thanks to Windo’s descriptive prose. The imagery and the way that the world and the various landscapes are described by Windo, the overgrown flora, lush vegetation, small settlements, dilapidated and crumbling buildings and the destroyed cityscape reminded me of The Last of Us video game (it’s a fantastic game, one of the best from the last generation so, if you’re not a gamer, please know, it’s a great comparison for me to make).The idea and premise behind the Feed are really interesting and it does make you think about and question our reliance, no matter how small on social media and our own personal feeds (anyone on Twitter, Facebook or any other social media already has a feed) in today’s digital age. As technology continues to advance you can predict that our dependence on both it and the required connectivity will only continue to grow as it spreads into every facet of our daily lives and due to this, I found the concept of the Feed to be very plausible for our future.I mentioned earlier in the review about being ‘taken‘ while you sleep. I’m not going to go into any overt detail and spoil the story but the introduction of Sylene as a character later in the book works really well as the catalyst to learn more about where the taken come from. When the reveal happens and the truth behind who is responsible for ‘taking‘ people is finally revealed you can understand the motivation and the reason why and it adds a whole extra dimension to the story being told.The Feed doesn’t feature a vast ensemble cast of characters and the main focus is on Tom, Kate and later on, Sylene too. There are a few secondary characters added to the mix too who all, no matter how briefly they appear have a role to play, are well developed and more importantly they add something to the overall story.When you have a book that is about surviving whatever life throws at you and enduring hardship, you need to feel something for the characters involved. You also need to factor in that Tom and Kate are parents searching for their abducted child and if you feel nothing for them then you won’t care about the outcome, you won’t care if one of them is taken, you won’t care if they find Bea and you won’t care if one or both of them dies. Luckily, Windo makes you care about Tom and Kate and they aren’t just names on a page, their grief is believable, you want them to overcome the obstacles and predicaments that they find themselves in on the search and more than anything you will find yourself willing them along on their journey as you want them to find Bea.I really thought that the ending of The Feed was outstanding. Sometimes books just seem to fizzle out as though the author doesn’t know how to end their work. There’s no such issue like that with The Feed and while it’s only my personal opinion, I found the ending to be everything I could have asked for and more. It’s the type of conclusion where you turn the final page, put the book down and think to yourself ‘damn, I wasn’t expecting that but damn, that was good‘.The Feed is a top draw and addictive read that deserves to be a hit. It’s a harrowing tale, at times moving, at times thoughtful and at times harsh. It will keep you coming back for more with characters that feel real and whose fate you care about, a vivid landscape and stellar thought-provoking story it is a compelling page-turner.The Feed is a welcome and worthy addition to the genre and anyone that enjoys post-apocalyptic fiction will find a lot to like in Windo’s accomplished debut work.Simply put, I loved this book.

So anyone who thought Tyrell Johnson had to dodge many Cormac McCarthy comparisons along the denuded road of his early 2018 novel The Wolves of Winter, had better be prepared for Nick Clark Windo's artful minefield dance and dodge in The Feed. This book is almost an exercise in 21st-century cliches - a decimated post-apocalypse landscape, social media gone wild to an extent we can scarcely imagine, and the true endgame for climate change centuries from now. Seeing as how this is Windo's debut novel, I fully expected one of these mines to explode in his face. Somehow, though, The Feed works well, though I'd still tell the person writing back-cover blurbs that this is much more of a sociological speculative fiction study or modernist sci-fi spinoff than a "thriller."Before I nitpick about elements of the story that did not quite coalesce, let me congratulate Windo on his creation of a world. Sure, the minimalist survivalist camps springing up after electrical grids and communication networks break down bring to mind similar camps from McCarthy, Johnson, and dozens of other writers, but Windo is wise to focus on the ad-hoc nature of the efforts, where many DIY attempts do not work, and humans struggle to simply carry on day to day. The foot travel over long distances reinforces the vision of a very small human on an expansive planet, but because the backdrop is upstate New York rather than the Yukon, the landscape is not as bleak as that of The Wolves of Winter -- though equally depopulated of humans. Other species, however, seem to be making more of an effort of taking back the Earth in Windo's novel than in Johnson's.The oversharing we already experience in traditional social media networks is hyper-exaggerated here, as people share direct brain-states and histories through the exchange of "mundles" or memory-bundles. The preservation of entire human personalities to achieve a sort of immortality hints at Cory Doctorow's 2017 novel Walkaway. Both Windo and Doctorow are vague on the specifics, Windo even more so than Doctorow, but the intent of both authors seems to be to allow the reader to come to individual conclusions of how humans would be represented by the sum total of their mental states.The supporting actors in this novel are given a partial fleshing out, but the bulk of the story centers on Tom Hatfield, whose character is somewhat brought to life, but particularly on the individual who may be Kate Hatfield or Silene Charles. Windo is compassionate in developing the survival strategies of the two-women-in-one, though it is evident that he wants to reinforce the idea that anger and revenge as motivating forces will never take you where you want to go. Charles and her compatriots among the futurist "takers" may have plenty of reasons to be furious at the abusive caretakers of the planet, but one would think that they would listen to the many-worlds physics-philosophers' warnings that the past can never be changed without spawning many unwanted worlds in its wake. And, in a caution most relevant for Charles' sons, that a turn to assassination and random terror will only destroy the perpetrator as well as the population of souls surrounding the victim -- or, as Lao Tzu would say in the Tao Te Ching, "There is always an official executioner. If you try to take his place, it is trying to be like a master carpenter and cutting wood. If you try to cut wood like a master carpenter, you will only hurt your own hand."It might be a little unfair to point out Windo's areas of implausibility, as many writers of more far-out sci-fi and fantasy make implausibility a selling point. But since Windo is writing a speculative fiction closer to lives actually lived, I will bring up two points that bugged me, and other readers might find additional ones. First of all, humans experiencing our limited forms of social-network sharing already are getting burned out, and people are leaving Facebook and Twitter in droves. I find it hard to believe that the fascination with The Feed would be so universal and absolute. Tom's father may have been a scoundrel, but there were no dictators trying to force people to try embedded and then genetically-adaptive mind-sharing tools. It seems as though "The Resisters" represented by Graham and Jane might well represent the majority of humans instead of a small minority of curmudgeons. Yes, The Feed is presented to the advertising-addled consumer as "candy everybody wants," but we are already a jaded enough species that I don't think that many people would be falling for the bait.Second, when we consider that the timeline of the main part of the book covers a mere dozen years, I have trouble believing the devastation would be as absolute as Windo suggests. Now, general nuclear war or a series of related global hyper-natural-disasters could wipe out the bulk of the human race in days, weeks, or months. But Windo is describing a series of localized, cascading disasters, capped by the death of The Feed and augmented by carefully-targeted terrorist actions. This could make global systems collapse pretty effectively, to be sure, but would all cities be purged of human populations in the timeframe of the book's initial six years? That seems unlikely.Some might find the linguistic tricks played to represent the racing of Kate's mind to be a typography formatting gimmick, but I have no problem with such gimmicks. Reading books by authors like Mark Z. Danielewski can be fun, and Windo only employs these techniques in a deft and minimal manner. The book's climax in The Tower, formerly home to Tom's parents, seems a bit overblown and melodramatic, yet Silene's/Kate's interpretation of the world and the decisions she makes to maximize a salvageable life give the novel a decent ending. The expansion of apocalyptic music and literature began not long after the turn of the millenium, and it has moved into hyper-drive since the coming of the Trump administration. Windo gets a pass on this one, because he managed to make The Feed quite enjoyable in spite of itself. But I would encourage writers and musical lyricists to take to heart the warning that the post-apocalypse landscape has played itself out, and then some. Time to find a new playground.

One sitting (almost) read, I devoured this story barely putting it down. Great concept, great execution, plenty of book trauma with a huge emotional rush of an ending. Left me vaguely tearful.Will be teaser reviewed during my "Ones to Watch in 2018" feature running at the moment. But DAMN what a rush.Wider review will also follow near publication.

I promised my daughter recently that I would try to read more books in her preferred genre and she would then agree to read a few more psychological thrillers! She reads a lot of apocalyptic and dystopian fiction and often has a few zombies running around her kindle as well! So when I saw the blurb for The Feed I thought it sounded like a book that we would both enjoy. But weirdly enough we had quite different reactions to it and not what you would expect from our usual preferences! She found it more literary in style than she would normally read and struggled to connect with it, whereas I absolutely loved it and have struggled to find a book to match the intensity of my reading experience since I finished it! I just can’t get it out of my head…..unlike “The Feed” itself which is the root cause of all the problems in this brilliant book!To begin with though I got rather overwhelmed by the sheer onslaught of technology and futuristic terminology terms so I worried it was going to carry on like that and I would struggle to understand what was going on and why. But everything started to become clearer the further into the book I got, although the “taken” part continued to puzzle me as I wanted to know more about what was happening to the characters who were being “taken” in their sleep. And more importantly WHY? Eventually I did…….And that’s when something just clicked for me and this book became completely unputdownable! There was a twisty OMG moment that came completely out of the blue and from that moment on, I was hooked until the final page.I can’t talk about the plot in detail because I want The Feed to affect others as much as it did me. I am very guilty of being permanently glued to my phone, constantly “googling” answers to questions I have, connecting with friends on Facebook, reading, booking travel, connecting with work, taking photos of family etc and I do struggle if I don’t have access to it! On holiday I try to have a week’s social media break but after about an hour I’m hunting down the nearest Wi-Fi connection, just so I can “check” that I’m not missing anything!! We are definitely the FOMO generation! Go into any coffee shop and I guarantee most people will have some sort of electronic device in front of them and groups of people will spend more time interacting with that device than with each other, recording their day for others to watch and only living their lives from behind that camera and not experiencing the real life emotions in front of them. So the scariest thing for me was that this vision of the future and the idea of The Feed was actually quite plausible. Could a similar concept potentially be a real part of our existence in the not so far off future?I got very tearful towards the end, which surprised me, but by that time I had become completely invested in the storyline and formed an emotional attachment to the characters. Not all the characters here were likeable but the situations they found themselves in were often desperate therefore it was impossible to judge them. When you have a family you will do anything to protect them and a primeval need to survive becomes both your friend and your enemy.I really didn’t expect to enjoy The Feed as much as I did. I lived through Tom and Kate’s search with them, journeying through a familiar landscape changed beyond recognition in a scarily realistic portrayal of a dystopian society. This is a thought provoking, dark and disturbing concept for a novel and the idea has been expertly explored, especially for a debut. It may have taken me a few days to get into it but it will remain with me for many more!Highly recommended by me!

"The days harden. They stay bright but the air becomes unkind." I really enjoyed reading The Feed! It was an intriguing dystopian story, and it had some elements from other stories I've enjoyed like Station Eleven, Battlestar Galactica, The Host, Black Mirror, Superman: Red Son, Station Eleven, and 11/22/63.I noticed other reviews complaining about not connecting with the characters - I agree with the sentiment, but I wasn't bothered by it. I felt like it was more important to relate to the story, and to put yourself into it, which was very easy to do. I'm not sure if people were expecting another Station Eleven, but if that's what you're looking for, this is not it. I feel like the anxiety and confusion were the main takeaways from this book. Some parts were slow, but I would always get drawn back in. I had fun reading this book. There were also a few over-the-top parts, but it wasn't too unbelievable. I would definitely read another book by Nick Clark Windo. Thank you to William Morrow for sending me this book!

Thanks to William Morrow for the advanced copy in exchange for my honest review!Who loves dystopian novels? Who wants something a little different and more unique in this genre? Well, THE FEED by Nick Clark Windo is exactly that. It's being compared to Mad Max meets THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS. Normally I'm not a big fan of the dystopian genre, but I really enjoyed this read!"It makes us. It destroys us. Now we must learn to live without it." The Feed is something that is accessible and used by everyone, everywhere, and whenever they want to/need to. It connects us to all the information and global events in live time. Everything in our lives is shared through it, including events, emotions, and images. It is something that is heavily relied on for understanding those around us - partners, friends, children, coworkers, etc.We meet Tom and Kate. While they use The Feed, Tom has managed to resist its addictive tendencies, which causes issues with his family because his father is the one that invented it. This ends up working in their favor when the unimaginable happens: The Feed collapses. Life as the world knew it is gone. People must now scavenge to survive, find food and shelter to avoid death. We enter back into the era of common ailments becoming a death sentence because the technology to treat them is gone. Tom and Kate seem to be surviving fine until their young daughter disappears. How will they be able to find her without The Feed to aid them?I thought this was an incredibly unique take on the end of the world premise. What would we do without technology constantly keeping us updated? With how dependent we are on technology to keep us connected I feel that this would be a very real scenario if everything stopped. If this intrigues you, then I would highly recommend picking this one up! I will definitely be looking for more from Windo in the future.I give this one 4/5 stars!

Um livro que me colocou ainda mais preocupada com o futuro desta humanidade cada vez mais viciada em tecnologia e incapaz de funcionar sem internet.Esta história apresenta-nos o Feed, uma rede social que está implementada no cérebro da população, onde podem aceder sem qualquer limite a memórias, pensamentos em tempo real e qualquer informação que necessitem. Já não existem livros, nem qualquer informação fora do Feed e no meio dos viciados só um grupo de resistentes é que tenta fugir ao seu controlo usando engenharia reversa.O casal principal da trama, Tom e Kate, tem uma ligação bem directa com o Feed. O pai e irmão de Tom são os criadores da rede e ele é contra essa criação, já Kate é uma personalidade famosa no Feed sendo seguida por milhões e adora a sua vida de “youtuber”. Um dia o Feed sofre um ataque de um grupo de hackers, é colocado offline e a humanidade já não sabe como viver o seu quotidiano sem o Feed na sua cabeça, sendo alguns dos cidadãos afectados com uma doença misteriosa.Todos terão que reaprender a fazer as mais simples tarefas e até o próprio vocabulário.Com uma temática assustadora, não foi um livro que me tenha prendido logo de início mas que ao fim de alguma insistência me envolveu neste que pode estar perto de ser um possível futuro para a nossa sociedade.

A stunning debut! I absolutely loved The Feed and have had to leave my review for a day to get over the book hangover it gave me. I was also left with that itchy brain feeling when a book totally gets under your skin and explores the darker locations of your imagination bringing to the surface even darker thoughts. The Feed is a cautionary and timely tale of how much we rely on social media; the internet is streamed directly into your brain and your memories/dreams etc are saved in something similar to Dropbox. Inevitably something goes wrong and The Feed collapses leaving people at a loss and struggling to function in a world without constant updates, contact and knowledge. Not only that, people's bodies are being invaded in their sleep - going to sleep as themselves but waking up with someone/something else inhabiting their mind and body. Scary stuff!! Invasion of the Body Snatchers terrified me as a teen and reading this brought back those feelings; what if your husband/wife/child truly isn't who you think they are??One of the scariest parts of The Feed was that it made me think...hmm this sounds totally plausible...would I go for the implant?! I love that this book made me think and that you're never quite sure who the "bad guys" are. No spoilers but the reveal when it comes is mind blowing. Fantastic stuff and I look forward to more from the author.My thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for my copy of The Feed