Ultraviolet

by Lesley Howarth

Published 7 June 2001
Radiation has made it impossible to go outside for eight months of the year. Alternative strategies for living and growing food have been adopted, and houses and towns are linked by undergound tunnels. Teenagers create an imaginative 'outdoors' via computers and some only meet in cyberspace. Some long to reclaim the outside world despite the dangers of radiation, and of being caught and kept indoors under a confining order. Violet is chief of the rebels and creates the avidly read 'horrorscopes'. She has an uncanny ability to catch glimpses of the future, but even she is unprepared for what happens when a little group visits the Undercliff, whose shade shelters the only real wild place left.