The Testament of Jessie Lamb

Jane Rogers’s The Testament of Jessie Lamb sets a YA-adjacent novel in a near-future Britain where a virus has made every pregnancy fatal to the mother. Society has fallen into multiple competing factions arguing about what to do about it. Jessie, sixteen years old, decides she wants to volunteer to be a Sleeping Beauty, a young woman who will be impregnated with a vaccinated embryo and kept in induced coma until the birth, after which she will die.

Rogers writes Jessie’s first-person narration with painful honesty. Jessie is a teenager. Her reasons for the choice are tangled with adolescent idealism, family conflict, and her own difficulty understanding what death actually means.

The book is structured as Jessie’s testament, written or recorded as she explains herself.

For readers who liked Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy or Naomi Alderman’s The Power, this is in adjacent territory. Shorter, more focused on a single family. Booker longlisted for good reason.