They, the penultimate book by the now-little-known writer Kay Dick, was published in 1977 and went out of print two years later. In 2020 a copy was discovered by a literary agent in a charity shop and has now been republished by Faber, billed as a ‘rediscovered dystopian masterpiece’.

This dreamlike novella follows an unnamed, ungendered narrator (although we are never quite sure whether they are the same person from chapter to chapter) travelling from place to place to escape the violence of a mob, only ever referred to as ‘They’, who are bent on the destruction of