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ABOUT THIS BOOK

PUBLISHER: Wild Goose Publications

ISBN: 9781804324202

RRP: £10.99

PAGES: 312

PUBLICATION DATE:
June 25, 2026

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Surplus to Requirements

By Janet Lees

The ‘Required to Die Act’ has changed everything.

On the eve of her eightieth birthday, the Old’un receives the message every citizen dreads: her life is now officially surplus to requirements. But instead of accepting the State-issued lethal dose, she chooses to disappear.

Armed with little more than memory, stubborn hope, and the stories that have shaped her life, she begins a dangerous journey north along the Wall towards the border of Free Scotland. Along the way she encounters hidden communities, unlikely companions, acts of brutality, and moments of extraordinary kindness.

Part dystopian thriller, part pilgrimage, Surplus to Requirements is a story about resistance, compassion, ageing and faith, and about what remains when society decides some lives no longer matter. Rooted in northern landscapes, memory and spiritual imagination, it is at once a warning and a testament: to the stubborn resilience of ordinary people who refuse to surrender their humanity.

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Janet Lees

Janet Lees is a writer and walker. Her favourite food on a long walk is fish and chips and ice cream. She has worked as a specialist speech and language therapist, school chaplain, community organiser, university researcher and lecturer and barefoot feminist theologian. A member of the Lay Community of St Benedict, she makes vegetable soup for the local warm space in her Derbyshire village and calls her 1980s Bambi camper van the Mobile Chapel of St Scholastica. Originally from a North London family of fish sellers, she moved to northern England half a lifetime ago and has also lived and worked in South Africa and Kenya. She is an expert on acquired childhood aphasia, a keen observer of the flora, fauna and fungi of the Transpennine Trail in Longdendale, and loves making patchwork quilts. She has been married to Bob for over thirty-three years.