Red Clocks
In a near-future United States where a Personhood Amendment has criminalized abortion, in-vitro fertilization, and any attempt by a single person to adopt, five women in a small Oregon fishing town move through the ordinary pressures the new law has made dangerous. A high school biology teacher tries to end a pregnancy she cannot raise, a married mother of two is unraveling into an affair, a single teacher wants a child more than she wants her career, a teenager looks for a way out, and the town's reclusive herbalist, known to the others only as the Mender, is about to stand trial for witchcraft in everything but name. Leni Zumas's 2018 novel cuts between the five without ever naming them, pressing on how a single statute reshapes friendship, work, medicine, and grief.
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What you might want to know about Red Clocks
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Abortion is illegal again, IVF is banned, and adoption requires two parents. In one Oregon fishing town, a high school biographer, a wife, a teenage girl, and a forest healer try to live around the new laws.
Yes. Red Clocks (2018) is a near-future dystopian novel set in an Oregon where abortion has been recriminalized and adoption restricted. Leni Zumas's structure follows five women through interconnected stories.
Yes. Red Clocks is widely cited alongside The Handmaid's Tale and The Power as a defining feminist dystopian novel of the 2010s. It is more grounded in plausible American near-future than Margaret Atwood's classic.
Red Clocks was written by Leni Zumas, published in 2018 by HarperCollins Publishers Limited.
Red Clocks is 503 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Red Clocks takes most readers 8 to 11 hours to finish.
Red Clocks is a standalone novel by Leni Zumas, not part of a series.
Red Clocks is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
