Raving English press: GRIME. A NOVEL by Sibylle Berg

With English publication of Sibylle Berg’s smash hit GRM (Grime in the US) on Dec 27, the Washington Post published a fantastic review which is as unafraid to be provocative as the book itself with lines such as:

„It’s like watching a very bloody, unfair cage fight with Ayn Rand: Atlas Slugged.“ and „Grime is Dave Eggers’s The Circle if The Circle were interesting.“

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/12/13/grime-sibylle-berg-review/

  • winner of the Swiss Book Award
  • winner of the Swiss Grand Prix for Literature
  • a bestseller! Highest ranking #4 on the SPIEGEL bestseller list
  • more than 150.000 copies sold
  • by the author of the bestseller RCE. REMOTE CODE EXECUTION (2021): https://www.kiwi-verlag.de/verlag/rights/book/sibylle-berg-rce-9783462001648
  • rights sold to Slovakia: Inaque / Spain: Alianza / Turkey: CAN / Ukraine: Books-XXI / USA: St. Martin’s Press (World English)
  • Bertolt Brecht Award 2020 for her life’s work
  • Recommended by New Books in German

Rochdale is a town in post-industrial Britain, but it could be anywhere on the digitalized, environmentally-decimated planet: a place devoid of hope, where poverty, violence, and squalor are the near-future consequences of decisions being made at this very moment. Grime is the dazzling multi-voice story of four teenagers haphazardly brought together by individual tragedy and a collective love of grime, the music genre that replaced punk as the sound of the angry and the dispossessed: martial-arts-obsessed Don(atella); Peter, a traumatized Polish boy; Karen, a tech-savvy girl with albinism; and Hannah, an orphan from Liverpool. Despite the increasingly sophisticated workings of an authoritarian surveillance state, the four set out to exact revenge on the people they hold responsible for their misery. But what starts out as a teen hit squad evolves into a makeshift family as the four kids attempt to create a home on the fringes – both physically and mentally – of society.

In this stylistically innovative epic, acclaimed novelist Sibylle Berg addresses the question currently being debated around the world: where will climate change, artificial intelligence, the rise of right-wing populism, and the inexorable expansion of surveillance lead? This masterful dystopian satire is a merciless and surgically-precise evisceration of neoliberalism, and beneath its rage and brutality beats a deeply human heart.