The Hush

In a near-future Britain roughly a decade after a devastating pandemic, a new crisis is unfolding in maternity wards across the country: healthy babies are dying at birth, with no medical explanation. As panic spreads, the government responds with sweeping emergency powers—surveillance, mandates, and controls that edge steadily toward the authoritarian, and pregnant women begin to vanish without a trace.

Seventeen-year-old Lainey is more worried about ordinary things—friends, secrets, the boy she likes—until one of those friends disappears and the danger becomes suddenly, terrifyingly personal. Her mother, Emma, a midwife, has spent the crisis trying to protect the women in her care, but when Lainey lands in trouble, the only person who might be able to help is the one Emma cut out of her life years ago: her own estranged mother.

Sara Foster's The Hush is a propulsive near-future thriller about bodily autonomy, state control, and the fierce bonds between mothers and daughters across three generations. Chilling and timely, it channels the atmosphere of dystopian speculative fiction into an intimate, fast-moving family story.