Will I love Chain-Gang All-Stars?

Chain Gang All Stars is the kind of book you read and you wish you wrote.

From its concept (a dystopian future in which corporate prisons coerce inmates to fight to the death in front of both live and televised audiences) to its larger-than-life characters (the indomitable Loretta Thurwar and the lightning-quick Hurricane Staxxx), the novel is all at once horrifying, darkly comic, and heartbreaking.

It’s one of those books with everything. Biting social commentary? Check. A complicated love story? Check. Longlisted for a National Book Award, I’d put my money on this novel to win.

Already one of my most anticipated books of the year, Chain-Gang All-Stars smashed every single one of my expectations.

As a reader, what I found most interesting was the question of what exactly the author could come up with that would be so bad that all these characters "willingly" (a debatable term, as we come to realise) choose the killing gladiator fields – and almost certain death – over continuing their sentence in prison. Well... we find out exactly what, and then some.

Personally, I found the prison timeline chapters most emotionally resonant. With characters tortured, stuck in solitary confinement,… show more.