The Wall

by John Lanchester

Overview

An NPR "Favorite Books of the Year" and Financial Times "Best Fiction of the Year" selection.

The best-selling author of The Debt to Pleasure and Capital returns with a chilling fable for our time.

Ravaged by the Change, an island nation in a time very like our own has built the Wall—an enormous concrete barrier around its entire coastline. Joseph Kavanagh, a new Defender, has one task: to protect his section of the Wall from the Others, the desperate souls who are trapped amid the rising seas outside and are a constant threat. Failure will result in death or a fate perhaps worse: being put to sea and made an Other himself. Beset by cold, loneliness, and fear, Kavanagh tries to fulfill his duties to his demanding Captain and Sergeant, even as he grows closer to his fellow Defenders. A dark part of him wonders whether it would be interesting if something did happen, if they came, if he had to fight for his life…

John Lanchester—acclaimed as "an elegant and wonderfully witty writer" (New York Times) and "a writer of rare intelligence" (Los Angeles Times)—has written a taut, hypnotic novel of a broken world and what might be found when all is lost. The Wall blends the most compelling issues of our time—rising waters, rising fear, rising political division—into a suspenseful story of love, trust, and survival.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324001638
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	03/05/2019
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

John Lanchester  is the author of five novels, including The Debt to Pleasure and Capital. His books have been translated into more than twenty-five languages, and he is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. He lives in London.

Editorial Reviews

…gripping…[The Wall] gathers momentum as it goes, and few readers will stop until they reach its final page.

The New York Times Book Review - Alec Nevala-Lee

01/21/2019

Lanchester (Capital) imagines coming of age amid the xenophobia and despair of a world ravaged by climate change in his dynamite dystopian novel. Twenty-something Joseph Kavanagh arrives for his mandatory two-year service as a Defender of the Wall surrounding his coastal country. It has survived the massive ecological devastation and sea level rise known as the Change, and its Defenders kill anyone from outside (known as Others) who tries to enter. Kavanagh suffers bracing cold, prolonged tedium, and the exacting demands of his company’s captain amid the fear of attack; any Defenders who fail are put out to sea. He gets to know his fellow soldiers and develops an incipient crush on androgynous and initially taciturn Hifa. After a war games training, a young politician warns the Defenders of rumors that the Others are increasingly desperate and some inside the country have been treasonously plotting ways to help them. Cracking under pressure, Hifa offers to have a child with Kavanagh, as parents receive a reprieve from duty, but their plans are obliterated by a surprise attack that has devastating consequences. This terrifyingly resonant depiction of desperation will spark lively discussions about the responsibilities climate change is restructuring, and is electrifying storytelling to boot. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"Lanchester’s novel…elegantly and chillingly imagines how current political attitudes might play out as the repercussions of climate change grow more severe."

New York Times

"Chillingly real."

New York magazine - Boris Kachka

"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

"Bold and confident fiction that highlights the current American and British issues of Trumpism and Brexit. "

|Los Angeles Times

"As in all good dystopian fiction, Lanchester shows us a world that could become a reality…[He] maintains measured, elegant prose–creating an assuredly human dystopian novel."

TIME - Lucas Wittmann

"Gripping…Full of tense action and sudden reversals…Few readers will stop until they reach its final page."

Alec Nevala-Lee

"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

"Thrilling…A topical and deftly satirical novel."

Wall Street Journal - Anna Mundow

"A chilling reminder of the ease with which myopia can turn to dystopia."

Houston Chronicle - Michael Magras

★ 2018-11-13

"Nothing before the sea was real": a bleak portrait of a future world shaped by global climate change and refugees desperate for a few square feet of dry land.

In the Britain of the near future, there are no beaches. Indeed, as the draftee called Kavanagh tells it, "there isn't a single beach left, anywhere in the world." Kavanagh, nicknamed Chewy by his fellow Defenders, has just one job: He has to guard a spot along the Wall ("officially it is the National Coastal Defense Structure") that now rings the island fortress. It's a preternaturally cold place, miserable, boring, but the stakes are high, for if any of the refugees called "The Others" get over the wall, one of the Defenders is put out to sea, exiled forever. Meanwhile, that Other, when inevitably captured, becomes one of "The Help," essentially enslaved; as the mother of Hifa, a fellow Defender, says, "Another human being at one's beck and call, just by lifting a finger, simply provided to one, in effect one's personal property…though of course they are technically the property of the state." Kavanagh is diligent if bitter, especially toward the parents who avert their eyes when they see him, ashamed that they let the Change occur, ashamed that their world has come to all this. Unashamed, as impenetrable as the Wall, is the Captain, Kavanagh's commander, who in time reveals that the monolithic state of elites, soldiers, and all the rest is less impervious than it appears, bringing on a sequence of events that finds Kavanagh, Hifa, and the Captain on the outside, in a Hobbesian world, desperate to get back in. Lanchester's view is unblinking, his prose assured, a matter of "if" and "then": This is what happens when the sea rises, this is what happens when an outsider lands in a place where life has little meaning and the only certain things are the Wall, the cold, the water, and death.

Dystopian fiction done just right, with a scenario that's all too real.

Kirkus Reviews

"Unputdownable. It’s 1984 for our times."

Michael Lewis

"Bold and confident fiction that highlights the current American and British issues of Trumpism and Brexit. It also examines the increasingly wide social and political divide of the young and the old."

Los Angeles Times - Ant Jones

"It’s not clear what it will take to finally convince us that it’s time to panic about climate change, but works of fiction such as The Wall have an important role to play."

Stephen Dyson

"A powerful thought experiment."

New York Review of Books - Giles Harvey

"Highly relevant."

Ron Charles

"An unsettling, compulsive and brilliant portrait of powerlessness."

Financial Times - John Day

"A novel that ranks alongside Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and the oeuvre of Kim Stanley Robinson as a fictional meditation on what climate change may mean for the planet."

Guardian - Tom Holland

Narrator Will Poulter takes on the role of Private Kavanagh, who reluctantly serves on the Wall. In this dystopia, the United Kingdom has built a wall to keep out rising sea levels as well as those who seek to escape "the change." Poulter's dispassionate narration tells the first-person story of a young man who is trained to be a protector of the wall. Poulter makes the right choice by keeping his narration aloof and cold as he speaks in the voice of the broken man. He conveys the stark reality of a world in which Kavanagh must fight and kill—or be sent out to sea. Listeners will be captivated by this timely story and tempted to listen through without stopping. A.R.F. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

MAY 2019 - AudioFile