Chain-Gang All-Stars

How it reads

Chain-Gang All-Stars is science fiction (dystopian science fiction, specifically), and its dominant mood is tense. The suspense is the kind you feel in your shoulders. It moves fast: plot-driven and hard to put down, the kind of book that carries you along even when you're tired.

It's set in an invented world, in the future, told in the third person across several viewpoints. Its central concerns are justice, power and politics and class and society. In weight it's heavy and literary — denser, more serious, and more demanding of you.

It stands alone, so there's nothing else you need to read first or after. The ending is bittersweet: it resolves, but at a price. At 367 pages it's an ordinary novel's length. It's well known, the kind of book most keen readers have heard of.