XX

XX imagines a near-future Britain where a new fertility treatment allows two women to conceive a biological child together — with a catch: the resulting embryos are always female. Jules and her partner Rosie are among the first couples to undergo the treatment, becoming minor celebrities and lightning rods in a national debate over the ethics and social consequences of a technology that could, in theory, make men reproductively unnecessary.

Angela Chadwick tells the story primarily through Jules's perspective as the pregnancy progresses, tracking the relationship strain that comes with sudden public visibility, the anti-treatment political movement gathering around them, and Jules's own private doubts about what she's agreed to bring into the world. The novel is less interested in the mechanics of the science than in how quickly a private reproductive choice gets absorbed into public ideology — feminist, religious, nationalist — by people who have never met the family at its center.

Written as speculative near-future fiction grounded in recognizable British politics and media culture, the book uses its premise to examine gender, family, and bodily autonomy without tipping into dystopian spectacle.