Manjula Padmanabhan's new novel Escape is set in a land where women have been eliminated and cloned generals maintain a smooth-functioning dictatorship. A young girl named Meiji, secretly brought up on an estate, makes a perilous journey to a distant city with her uncle, Youngest. Along the way, she must understand her own uniqueness and deal with ideas that she was never brought up to imagine. Meanwhile, Youngest's own internal conflict — his moral sense of responsibility to Meiji clashing with the fact that his body is aroused by her proximity — makes the book more than a pat morality tale.