An excerpt and short introduction by the author, John C. A. Manley…

Hands on hips, she stood behind the counter, glaring at me.

“No face, no service,” she said clearly and firmly.

“What?” I blurted as the door swung closed behind me, jingling a bell. “You mean: No mask, no service — right?”

“No face, no service,” she repeated with all the sharpness of a knife swiftly slicing bread. “This is a bakery, not a bank.” 

The overwhelming smell of fresh sourdough penetrated the polyester mask stretched over my nose, mouth and chin. I took a few slow steps towards the counter separating us, shaking my head in non-understanding. 

“A bank?” I almost gasped. “What are you talking about?”

The twenty-something girl with a slight German accent raised a hand mirror from the countertop and aimed it at me. 

“You look like a bank robber.” 

So opens the first chapter of my forthcoming novel, Much Ado About Corona: A Dystopian Love Story – a book I hope will help derail the corona craze before it’s too late.

“…politicians, governments fear books,” says Richard Evans, author of the New York Times bestseller The Christmas Box, in an interview. “Every revolution started with a book. Every single one of them — whether it is religious, cultural or political — there is always a book at the base of it.”

Uncle Tom’s Cabin had such an effect on the Civil War. When Lincoln met author Harriet Stowe he’s been quoted as saying: “So this is the little lady who started this great war.”

Alabama author Mark Childress credited Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird with having a similar impact on the civil rights movement: “I think the book really helped [white people] come to understand what was wrong with the system in the way that any number of treatises could never do, because it was popular art…”

Likewise, in the battle against totalitarianism, here are five dystopian classics:

Back in March of 2020, when lockdown began, I put down the urban fantasy novel I’ve been (re)writing for the last ten years; and picked up my pencil to write a short story set in a grim COVID future. 145,000 words later I was faced with a novel (and a sequel) about the novel coronavirus: Much Ado About Corona: A Dystopian Love Story. It’s a story which seeks not to predict the outcome of the corona hoax but to prevent it. After six hundred hours of work (and counting), I expect the novel will be released by autumn 2021.

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