Joma West’s FACE is a speculative novel about designer babies, social media fame, race, and the lies we allow ourselves to believe in order to make us feel whole. Margaret Atwood meets Kazuo Ishiguro in this sci-fi domestic drama that reimagines race and class in a genetically engineered society fed by performative fame.
FACE
by Joma West
Tor/St. Martin’s Press, August 2022
(via Mushens Entertainment)
How much is your Face worth? Schuyler and Madeline Burroughs have the perfect Face — rich and powerful enough to assure their dominance in society. But in SchAddie’s household, cracks are beginning to appear. Schuyler is bored and taking risks. Maddie is becoming brittle, her happiness ever more fleeting. And their menial is fighting the most bizarre compulsions.
In FACE, skin color is an aesthetic choice designed by professionals, consent is a pre-checked box on the path to social acceptance, and your online profile isn’t just the most important thing — it’s the only thing.
Joma West is a third culture writer whose work straddles both fantasy and science fiction. Growing up bouncing between countries has given her work a certain displaced flavour and you can see many African and Asian influences in her writing. Joma’s novella, Wild, won the 2016 MMU novella award. She has had short stories published in various anthologies. She lives in Glasgow.
Practical, unassuming Jane Shoringfield has done the calculations, and decided that the most secure path forward is this: a husband, in a marriage of convenience, who will allow her to remain independent and occupied with meaningful work. Her first choice, the dashing but reclusive doctor Augustine Lawrence, agrees to her proposal with only one condition: that she must never visit Lindridge Hall, his crumbling family manor outside of town.
Enter the halls of Parliament with Varic, Coron of the Corvaric Coast. Visit Strange House with the Archmage Birch. Explore the mountains of Lady Longlight alongside the Palion Silvern, Sorcerer. 
Every night, while the street lamps shed the only light on Wisconsin’s most crime-ridden city, police transcriber Hazel Greenlee listens as detectives divulge Black Harbor’s gruesome secrets. As an aspiring writer, Hazel believes that writing a novel could be her only ticket out of this frozen hellscape. And then her neighbor confesses to hiding the body of an overdose victim in a dumpster.
The Right Sort Marriage Bureau was founded in 1946 by two disparate individuals—Mrs. Gwendolyn Bainbridge (whose husband was killed in the recent World War) and Miss Iris Sparks, who worked as an intelligence agent during the recent conflict, though this is not discussed. While the agency flourishes in the post-war climate, both founders have to deal with some of the fallout that conflict created in their personal lives. Miss Sparks finds herself followed, then approached, by a young woman who has a very personal connection to a former paramour of Sparks. But something is amiss, and it seems that Iris’s past may be causing something far more deadly than mere disruption in her personal life. Meanwhile, Gwendolyn is struggling to regain full legal control of her life, her finances, and her son—a legal path strewn with traps and pitfalls. Together these indomitable two are determined and capable—and not just of making the perfect marriage match.