Grime: A Novel

(Paperback)

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Rochdale is a town in post-industrial Britain, but it could be anywhere on the digitalized, environmentally-decimated planet: a place devoid of hope, where poverty, violence, and squalor are the near-future consequences of decisions being made at this very moment. Grime is the dazzling multi-voice story of four teenagers haphazardly brought together by individual tragedy and a collective love of grime, the music genre that replaced punk as the sound of the angry and the dispossessed: martial-arts-obsessed Don(atella); Peter, a traumatized Polish boy; Karen, a tech-savvy girl with albinism; and Hannah, an orphan from Liverpool. Despite the increasingly sophisticated workings of an authoritarian surveillance state, the four set out to exact revenge on the people they hold responsible for their misery. But what starts out as a teen hit squad evolves into a makeshift family as the four kids attempt to create a home on the fringes - both physically and mentally - of society. In this stylistically innovative epic, acclaimed novelist Sibylle Berg addresses the question currently being debated around the world: where will climate change, artificial intelligence, the rise of right-wing populism, and the inexorable expansion of surveillance lead This masterful dystopian satire is a merciless and surgically-precise evisceration of neoliberalism, and beneath its rage and brutality beats a deeply human heart. Grime spent 25 weeks on European bestseller lists and won the Swiss Book Prize.

Reviews

"This is a novel so caustic it should be printed with hydrochloric acid. Berg, a Swiss writer and social activist, sprays her fury across the whole landscape of technological and economic manias that are rendering the 21st century intolerable. And Tim Mohr has done a remarkable job of translating Berg's hilarious, hectoring, hyperbolic prose, which isn't so much propulsive as relentless....No other book has so thoroughly rattled me about where we're headed." --Ron Charles, the Washington Post

"A book like an explosive device." --Die Zeit

"Watch out, this book bites...an icepick-sharp social commentary." --Tages-Anzeiger

"Combines apocalyptic entertainment with magical indignation about the state of the world." --Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Author Bio

SIBYLLE BERG is a Swiss-German author and playwright, and one of the most celebrated contemporary writers in the German-speaking world. Born in Weimar, Germany, they have written 27 plays, 15 novels, and numerous anthologies and radio plays. Their work has been translated into 34 languages. Berg is part of the Straight Edge movement and identifies as non-binary. The German-language edition of Grime won the Swiss Book Prize. In 2020, Berg received Switzerland's highest literary award, the Grand Prix Literature, for their work. They live in Zurich.