Blurb:

Enter a whole new world, in this thrilling debut novel set entirely within a beehive.

Born into the lowest class of her society, Flora 717 is a sanitation bee, only fit to clean her orchard hive. Living to accept, obey and serve, she is prepared to sacrifice everything for her beloved holy mother, the Queen.

I wanted to read this book after it was put forward as a suggestion for one of our bookclub meetings and I wasn't disappointed. This is a really interesting, detailed and well written book and fully deserves it's place on the Bailey's prize list.

The detail about bee society is amazing, the author must have done so much research into the subject, but what I found as I was reading the book was that you could easily forget that this was about bees and relate it just as equally to human societies, perhaps what the author wanted to achieve. Flora 717, the protagonist of the novel, is born into the lowest tier of society but has potential to develop, but only if society allows it. Her fight against her birth class to protect her hive and receive holy mother's love, whilst battling her personal desires explores not only a personal level of battles for existence and achieving what she wants out of her life, but the battles of a totalitarian society where the elite try to retain control by creating barriers and how these can be challenged.

All in all a great book and well worth reading.

I loved this book, what a great new way to present dystopian fiction.

I echo KT-J's comment above, don't want to give any spoilers here so all I want to say is it's wonderfully written, very descriptive and it was a joy to have read it.

Very happy this was chosen as our book club read.