The Future Saints

LoveReading Says

April 13, 2024. Theo Ford watches a woman haunt the stage of a rundown California bar, a bottle of tequila in one hand and a guitar in the other. The crowd is small, fifty or so West Coast hipsters - but the devotion is palpable. She’s transfixing. Six years into their career, The Future Saints should be headlining arenas, not playing to near-empty rooms.

But their new sound isn’t landing, their lives are unravelling, and the promise that once made them Manifest Records’ next big thing is flickering out.

Enter Theo, the label’s artist relations manager, a fixer with a specialisation in disaster. He’s the one sent to deal with bands that are burning out. The Grim Reaper. And Hannah Cortland, The Saints’ lead singer is a wildfire. Bruised, brilliant, and heartbreakingly self-destructive, she’s everything Theo has been warned to avoid. And everything he can’t look away from.

Told through a collage of perspectives: Hannah’s raw, intimate voice; Theo’s measured recollections; and a myriad of social media posts, interview snippets, and magazine features, The Future Saints captures the rise, fall, and reinvention of a band searching for meaning through music, grief, and love.

At its core, this is the story of sisterhood and loss. Virginia Cortland, Hannah’s sister, went for a swim one day and never came home. Her absence defines every act that follows. Every decision. Yet to call this a book about grief is to misunderstand it. It’s not about death. it’s about resurrection. It’s about hope. It’s about making something beautiful out of pain and showing the people we’ve lost how deeply they were loved.

It’s visceral and electric: the sound of a band finding itself again. Of Theo and Hannah finding something, too. Love, maybe, or redemption, or both.

By the time Grammy buzz builds and Saturday Night Live comes calling, it’s impossible not to feel the ache of everything they’ve survived to get there. The Suit and The Creative. The order and the chaos. Two people from different worlds bound together by music, by sound, by fury, and longing.

The Future Saints is a gut punch of a page-turner. It grabbed me and wouldn’t let me go. A novel about music, fame, and the messy, glorious business of being alive. It hums with the rhythm of heartbreak and the defiance of hope, and I bloody loved it. 

Deborah Maclaren

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