Wake Up

By Tim Pears

Published Jan 2010

For John, a potato isn’t just a staple food, it’s wondrous, the secret of his success and key to the future. With his brother, Greg, he has tuned their father’s greengrocery business into Spudnik, Britain’s largest dealer in potatoes as edible vaccines: plants genetically modified to provide an edible alternative to injections. But as John spins round and round the ring road avoiding his turn-off to work he has to figure out how to tell his brother that, deep in the Venezuelan jungle, volunteers have died during the latest illegal trials, Deaths they have to find some way to hide.

Provocative, gripping, funny and disturbing, this is a book about our restless times, our blindfold glide into a new genetic age.