Grime: A Novel

"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

The first English translation of iconic Swiss-German novelist Sibylle Berg—a ruthless indictment of contemporary society and a strikingly creative manifesto for rebellion.

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? Reminiscent of the work of William Gibson and Jennifer Eagan, 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.