The Divers' Game - Hardcover

Jesse Ball

3.43

1,728 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 178378587X ISBN 13: 9781783785872

Publisher: Granta Publications Ltd, 2019

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A pair of girls, Lethe and Lois, navigates the perimeters of a segregated city, armed with canisters of killing gas. Another child, Lessen, is at the centre of a bizarre cultural ritual that could be the subject of a Goya painting. Centring on the garish festivals of an allegorical nation, The Divers' Game moves through worlds in which kindness is no longer meaningful. A scathing indictment of the inequalities of Western society, it makes visible the violence that has threaded its way into every aspect of our lives, and the radical empathy we need to combat it.

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Review:

Praise for The Divers' Game:

'A haunting and deeply felt parable about duty, morality and violence... It interrogates the stories we persist in telling about what it is to be a person, and how often they contain the lie of superiority asserted as nature. Ball fictionalises this culture of dominance, and captures how it metastasises into institutions of justice and education, as well as into the gestures and choices of everyday life. By exposing the workings of supremacy in the human imagination, his novel makes a contribution towards preventing it from being our permanent future' Guardian

'Thanks to [Ball's] giant Atwoodian imagination, elegant writing, and fiery, contagious sense of injustice [...] this literary call to arms stays on the right side of missionary zeal. He cries out for "radical empathy". I can t think of a better description of what's required' Big Issue

'Ball richly imagines a society where empathy is eroded at every level... Chilling' Observer

'Powerful... A dark fairytale... Ball's approach has a sort of shock and spite to it, though; a structural brutality that reflects the world he's made... The Divers' Game can be quite hard to read for all the resonances it carries of real segregated societies. And it is primarily Ball's thorniness as a writer, his perverse streak tempered by an innocence similar to George Saunders that makes it easier to countenance the creation of them, and keeps them urgent' Irish Times

'Chilling... A timely homily' Mail on Sunday

'You sense Ball's razor-edged cleverness at work' Daily Mail

Tom Sutcliffe: 'The Divers' Game itself, it has re-ocurred in my mind a couple of times since I read it because it is such a horrifying thought'
Helen Lewis: 'It really captures the thoughtless cruelty of children'
--BBC Radio 4 Saturday Review

About the Author:

Jesse Ball's many works of absurdity and radicalism have been published in more than a dozen languages. He was selected as one of Granta magazine's Best of Young American Novelists in 2017. His novel Census won the Gordon Burn Prize in 2018. He lives in Chicago.

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