The Divers' Game

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.

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.