It's here! Rachel Delahaye introduces much-anticipated sequel 'Electric Life: Surge'

We’re so excited to have just published Electric Life: Surge, the much anticipated sequel to Rachel Delahaye’s award-winning and utterly unputdownable 2023 dystopian novel Electric Life.

In Electric Life, teenager Alara’s gaming skills bring her to the attention of the leaders of Estrella, the ‘Star city’ where she lives. Estrella is the perfect society: an immaculate, sanitised, hyper-connected environment where everything is channelled through the digital medium. But beneath it lies the old, semi-deserted city of London Under, where Alara is sent on a dangerous mission. What she discovers there, however, leads her to abandon her ‘perfect’ life in Estrella in favour of London Under, drawn by a place that’s edgier, dirtier, riskier – but real.

If, like us, you’ve been itching to know what might have happened next, the wait is over! Here’s Rachel to tell us more…

Rachel Delahaye

“I knew that it couldn’t end there”

Rachel Delahaye: “After we left Alara contemplating her decision to leave Estrella in Electric Life, I knew that it couldn’t end there. There were too many unresolved emotions, and too many sacrifices that needed to be justified. So, the process of writing a sequel began!

“In Electric Life Surge, Alara has been living in London Under for six months and the initial excitement of living free from technology and monitoring is starting to wear off. In Under, the tunnels are vibrating with political unrest as an anti-Estrella populist group gains support. Alara, as an Estrella defector, is suddenly in the spotlight. It’s just another unwelcome pressure on top of the frustrations she’s begun to feel living in Under’s close-knit community. With her boyfriend no longer making her happiness his priority, the excitement she first experienced living in Under has started to wane. In fact, the whole place is starting feel claustrophobic: full of expectation, unwritten rules, judgement and sensory overload.

“Alara feels that she wants to leave, but she can’t return to Estrella. She’ll be killed, or if she isn’t, she’ll die of boredom. Drowning in danger from above and below, Alara must find a way to surface and find her enthusiasm again – for the land, for her life and for the future.

“We seem to support leaders and groups with the fervour of a football team”

“This story is very much a reflection of today’s binary thinking. I’ve been strongly influenced by the tribal nature of our current politics, and by how we seem to support leaders and groups with the fervour of a football team, without allowing ourselves to see that two people can be right, and two people can be wrong, and no system is a hundred percent perfect. There’s an awkward moment in Surge where we realise that the populists actually do have a point, and their supporters have legitimate concerns. But we also learn that bad leaders can exploit truths and sometimes battles have gone so far and become so convoluted, that the only solution is to start again.

“A good and fair life is not a given - like love, it must be worked towards”

“I also wanted to address the themes of love and infatuation. My characters are young, and as a reader you might think that their emotions seem mature - but this is a world where children grow up fast, learn lessons quickly and are forced to make decisions about loyalty and love at an early age. In Electric Life, Alara falls hard for Jay. But we are six months on now, and that infatuation period is over and Alara is struggling to accept that. She left Estrella, not just because of its manipulation, but also because she was seduced by the electricity and newness of Under. She’s desperate to claw that feeling back, but the eventual realisation that she can’t chase happiness is the turning point for her as a maturing woman, and also a political activist. A good and fair life is not a given. Like love, it’s something that must be worked towards, even fought for, every day.

“I hope this sequel will satisfy everyone who has written to me asking for one - which has been lovely – thank you to everyone who wrote! (To the student who wrote asked for an alien invasion, I’m sorry, maybe next time?). It’s been an absolute honour to be able to write the follow up to Electric Life, and a total joy to be back in those troubled worlds I created. I hope that, like the first, it will inspire readers to look up from their screens, absorb the natural world around us and imagine a place where no one is denied the basic right of breathing clean air and living in peace.”

Discover more at www.troikabooks.com/electric-life-surge