2024 McKitterick Prize (shortlist)
A virtuoso journey into networks of power, our embroilment with new technologies, and the dangers of corruption, by an electrifying debut novelist.
When the investigative reporter Quentin Jones’s story about covert military interrogation practices in the Desert War is buried, he is spurred to dig deeper, and he unravels a trail that leads to VIRTUE: cutting-edge technology that simulates reality during interrogation.
As the shadowy labyrinths of governmental corruption unfurl and tighten around him, unnerving links to his protégé Bruce—who, like Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz, disappeared into the war several years earlier—keep emerging.
Greg Jackson's The Dimensions of a Cave is a virtuoso journey into networks of power, our embroilment with new technologies, and the dangers of corruption. It explores our drive toward war, violence, and venality, placing humanity and idealism under the spotlight.
Genre: Literary Fiction
When the investigative reporter Quentin Jones’s story about covert military interrogation practices in the Desert War is buried, he is spurred to dig deeper, and he unravels a trail that leads to VIRTUE: cutting-edge technology that simulates reality during interrogation.
As the shadowy labyrinths of governmental corruption unfurl and tighten around him, unnerving links to his protégé Bruce—who, like Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz, disappeared into the war several years earlier—keep emerging.
Greg Jackson's The Dimensions of a Cave is a virtuoso journey into networks of power, our embroilment with new technologies, and the dangers of corruption. It explores our drive toward war, violence, and venality, placing humanity and idealism under the spotlight.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"A very contemporary story about surveillance capitalism, virtual reality, and 21st-century forever war, [that] will still be read a century from now for the news it brings about the timeless riddle of the human self. It's increasingly rare these days to find a novelist with Greg Jackson's world-swallowing ambition, and rarer still for one to make good on that ambition as gloriously as Jackson does here." - Christopher Beha
"Greg Jackson's prose is sly, wise, and almost self-consciously heroic, undaunted by the present moment, though it threatens to be our last." - Joshua Cohen
"Greg Jackson is an athletically talented writer who packs so much into every single sentence and scene it almost scares me. His debut novel is somehow both a hardboiled thriller and a philosophical treaty with dialogues that would make Sorkin blush." - Catherine Lacey
"Greg Jackson's Dimensions of a Cave is, sentence to sentence, a linguistic marvel, a genre-bending tale with moral and philosophical stakes as profound as they come." - Dinaw Mengestu
"Greg Jackson's prose is sly, wise, and almost self-consciously heroic, undaunted by the present moment, though it threatens to be our last." - Joshua Cohen
"Greg Jackson is an athletically talented writer who packs so much into every single sentence and scene it almost scares me. His debut novel is somehow both a hardboiled thriller and a philosophical treaty with dialogues that would make Sorkin blush." - Catherine Lacey
"Greg Jackson's Dimensions of a Cave is, sentence to sentence, a linguistic marvel, a genre-bending tale with moral and philosophical stakes as profound as they come." - Dinaw Mengestu
Visitors also looked at these books
Used availability for Greg Jackson's The Dimensions of a Cave