About the book
The novel follows two star fighters, lovers on the same team, alongside the audiences and activists around the games.
Curated by intendle
Published
Science Fiction & Speculative Fiction
Chain-Gang All-Stars
Written by
Published by
Pantheon Books (Knopf Doubleday)
In a near-future United States, prisoners can win their freedom by competing in a wildly popular gladiatorial television sport, fighting to the death for entertainment.
- Published
- 2023
- Pages
- 367
- Format
- Hardcover (US first edition; UK...
- Language
- English
In Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's ferocious debut novel, mass incarceration has been turned into prime-time spectacle: prisoners can fight their way to freedom in televised gladiatorial combat, killing or dying for the entertainment of a cheering nation.
At the center are Loretta Thurwar and Hurricane Staxxx, star fighters and lovers whose bond gives the carnage its aching human core. Chain-Gang All-Stars is dystopian satire with the safety off, extrapolating America's prison-industrial complex only slightly to make its cruelty impossible to look away from, and Adjei-Brenyah reinforces the fiction with footnotes citing real statistics and cases.
The violence is brutal by design, but the novel's anger is disciplined and its tenderness real; this is protest fiction that never forgets to be a story. It asks how a society learns to consume suffering as amusement, and implicates the reader in the watching.
Fierce, formally inventive and morally urgent, it announced a major novelist and stands among the most talked-about speculative debuts of its year.
The book
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Pages
367
Published
2023
Pantheon Books (Knopf Doubleday)
Where to buy
Format
Hardcover (US first edition; UK...
Language
English
Science Fiction & Speculative Fiction
ISBN
978-0593317334
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