Dark Lullaby

CONTENTS
Cover
Praise for Dark Lullaby
Title Page
Leave us a Review
Copyright
Dedication
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Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also Available from Titan Books


Praise for Dark Lullaby
‘With fabulous world-building and a plot so tight you could bounce a quarter off of it, Dark Lullaby is a Handmaid’s Tale for the modern world, about the ways our human need for love can serve as both society’s salvation, and its undoing.’
Sarah Langan, author of Good Neighbors
‘This gripping thriller has everything: beautiful writing, shedloads of tension, family drama. It made me grateful for my fragile freedoms.’
Emily Koch, author of If I Die Before I Wake
‘Dark Lullaby is hard-hitting, mournful and deeply affecting, reading like the offspring of Never Let Me Go and 1984, and it addresses universal fears about early parenthood without providing easy answers. I raced through it and when I’d finished, it made me hug my own children tight.’
Tim Major, author of Hope Island
‘A heart-wrenching and beautifully told novel, absolutely compelling, and scarily plausible. This is the best kind of speculative fiction: thoughtful, committed, alert to the outlines of a possible near-future, that inhabits your mind long after reading. One of the most important books to be published this year.’
Marian Womack, author of The Golden Key
‘An expertly crafted exploration of love and loss, with a truly haunting conclusion. Intimate, often poetic prose shines bright through the encroaching dread. Bleak, beautiful and bittersweet at every turn. I loved it.’
Martyn Ford, author of Every Missing Thing
‘Polly Ho-Yen masterfully balances eerie, dream-like prose with a distressingly realistic portrayal of a world where reproductive right has become reproductive responsibility. To be a parent is to live with your heart outside your body and, through smart world-building, memorable characters and sharp insight, Dark Lullaby perfectly encapsulates the power and terror of that love.’
Dave Rudden, author of The Wintertime Paradox
‘Dark Lullaby is a gripping story of love and desperation, of intimate and social structures, of sisterhood and motherhood that rings true as a bell. I devoured it.’
Deirdre Sullivan, author of Perfectly Preventable Deaths


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Dark Lullaby
Print edition ISBN: 9781789094251
E-book edition ISBN: 9781789094268
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
www.titanbooks.com
First edition: March 2021
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.
© Polly Ho-Yen 2021. All Rights Reserved.
Polly Ho-Yen asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.


To Dan


I scarce believe my love to be so pure
As I had thought it was,
Because it doth endure
Vicissitude, and season, as the grass;
Methinks I lied all winter when I swore
My love was infinite, if spring make it more.
from ‘Love’s Growth’ by John Donne


OSIP stands for the Office of Standards in Parenting.
IPS refers to an ‘insufficient parenting standard’.
Induction is the process of fertility treatments a woman undertakes to conceive a child.
Extraction is the process of a child being removed from the care of their biological parent or parents if the standard of care is deemed insufficient by OSIP.
Out is an unofficial term referring to a person viewed as one of ‘OSIP’s Un-Tapped’.


THEN
The last time that I saw Mimi she was almost one.
We decided to celebrate her birthday early, just Thomas and myself, along with Thomas’s mother Santa, the only parent we had left between us.
I’d made a cake out of little more than pure oats, butter and maple syrup; Mimi had just been diagnosed with an intolerance to gluten and I was now vigilant to the point of obsessive over any crumb that passed her lips since I had received the last IPS.
I suppose that as we sat down around our small table that night in November we were thinking of how little time we had left with her. We did not speak of it. We simply lost ourselves in my pathetic, flattened offering of a cake, with the electric candle that Thomas had bought especially sitting crookedly on top.
There was a part of me that knew then.
That very morning, I’d buried my face into the wispy fuzz that settled on the crown of her head after she napped. ‘Her little halo,’ Thomas called it, bouncing a hand upon its golden springiness. I knew it then, at that moment: We don’t have long left together. But it was such an awful thought, one so singed with pain, so full of blackness, an emptiness like no other, that I didn’t dare examine it. I shoved it away desperately and whispered, ‘Happy birthday, darling girl,’ into the silkiness of her tiny ear.
We gathered closer together as we began to sing ‘Happy Birthday’, pulled towards each other as though the little hard light from the candle’s bulb gave off something like warmth. We sounded weary. The words no