The Wall

by John Lanchester

Overview

Shortlisted for the 2020 Orwell Prize


"Thrilling…A topical and deftly satirical novel." —Anna Mundow, Wall Street Journal

In this taut, dystopian tale, an island nation ravaged by the Change has built an enormous concrete barrier around its coastline—the Wall. Joseph Kavanagh, a new Defender, has one task: to protect his section of the Wall from the Others, the desperate souls trapped amid the rising seas outside. A blend of the most compelling issues of our time—climate change, increasing fear, widening divisions—The Wall is a suspenseful story of love, trust, and survival.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393357776
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	03/17/2020
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	184,708
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

John Lanchester is the best-selling author of the novels The Debt to Pleasure, Capital, and The Wall, among others other works of fiction and nonfiction. His work has been translated into twenty-five languages and his books have won the Hawthornden Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Prize, the E. M. Forster Award, and been longlisted for the Booker Prize. A regular contributor to the London Review of Books and The New Yorker, he lives in London.

Editorial Reviews

"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."

Ant Jones - 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."

Lucas Wittmann - Time

"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."

Tom Holland - Guardian

"A powerful thought experiment."

Giles Harvey - New York Review of Books

"Highly relevant."

Ron Charles - Washington Post

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

John Day - Financial Times

"A harrowing, brilliant, and troublingly plausible vision of the future."

Emily St. John Mandel

Unputdownable. It’s 1984 for our times.

Michael Lewis

Gripping.… Few readers will stop until they reach its final page.

Alec Nevala-Lee - New York Times Book Review

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 - Washington Post

…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

"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."

Lucas Wittmann - TIME

"Thrilling…A topical and deftly satirical novel."

Anna Mundow - Wall Street Journal

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

Michael Magras - Houston Chronicle

"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

"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

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

|Los Angeles Times

"Chillingly real."

Boris Kachka - New York magazine

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

Los Angeles Times

A writer as funny as he is humane, John Lanchester has made a specialty of chronicling our contemporary descent into hell in the most charming possible way. This novel of life in the aftermath of climate change apocalypse is no exception. It is the scariest and most entertaining book I have read in a long time.

Keith Gessen

Like Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian love story Never Let Me Go, The Wall is intelligent, emotionally layered, and suspenseful, a pleasure to read in spite of the bleak future in which it is set. I only wish that this richly imagined future didn’t feel quite as plausible as it does at the moment.”

Adelle Waldman

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.”

Kim Stanley Robinson

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, 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

Book by book, John Lanchester proves himself one of our necessary writers, equal in wit, good nature, and fundamental sanity to whatever insane thing the new century throws at us. Like some lost work by George Orwell, The Wall reveals what’s in front of all our noses.”

Garth Risk Hallberg

Beautifully written and chillingly plausible, Lanchester’s work is dystopian fiction at its finest.

Booklist

Chillingly real.

Boris Kachka - New York

★ 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

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