Chain-Gang All-Stars

Genre

Science Fiction & Speculative Fiction

Publisher

Pantheon Books (Knopf Doubleday)

Publication year

2023

ISBN

9780593317334

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. The novel follows two star fighters, lovers on the same team, alongside the audiences and activists around the games. Nana...

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.