book cover of The Wall
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The Wall

(2018)
A novel by

 
 
Awards
2020 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction (nominee)
2019 Booker Prize (longlist)

* A Financial Times and Evening Standard Book of the Year *

* LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2019 *


* SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION 2020 *

'Masterly . . . A signal achievement . . . Remarkable.'
Guardian

'A
1984 for our times.' Daily Express

Kavanagh begins his time patrolling the Wall.

If he's lucky, if nothing goes wrong, he only has to do two years of this. 729 more nights.

The best thing that can happen is that he survives and gets off the Wall and will never have to spend another day of his life anywhere near it.

But what if something did happen - if the Others came, if he had to fight for his life?

Thrilling and heartbreaking,
The Wall is about a troubled world you will recognise as your own - and about what might be found when all is lost.

The Wall was longlisted for the Booker Prize in July 2019.




Genre: Science Fiction

Praise for this book

"A dystopian distillation of our troubled times, and an allegorical glimpse at a still-grimmer future, The Wall reminds us that even as politics corrupts and destroys and presses on undiminished, the soul erupts in surprising places to act as counterpoint and resistance. This patient, direct, suspenseful novel is one such eruption, and a civilizing comfort amid the simmering bloodlust." - Joshua Ferris

"John Lanchester writes with such clarity and effectiveness that his prose is a pleasure I always look forward to. His previous novels have all been memorable evocations of the world we're familiar with, but The Wall is something new: almost an allegory, almost a dystopian-future warning, partly an elegant study of the nature of storytelling itself. I was hugely impressed by it." - Philip Pullman

"With The Wall, John Lanchester follows his mind-boggling financial essays and his great realist novel Capital with a bold science fiction fable, a vivid, swift, chilling, and ultimately beautiful human story. All his work is of a piece-he wants his readers to see our moment better, and then do something about it." - Kim Stanley Robinson

"In The Wall, John Lanchester takes our current political climate to its terrible and logical extreme. A harrowing, brilliant, and troublingly plausible vision of the future." - Emily St. John Mandel


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