*"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.
