Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Chain-Gang All-Stars is a brutal novel about incarceration, in an America where prisoners can elect to be part of a blood sport where they fight for the death with the hope of freedom. Loretta Thurwar is an icon, having almost survived three years of deathly gladiator matches as a Link, an individual fighter as part of a Chain of others, alongside her love Hamara Stacker, aka Hurricane Staxx. Both hide secrets as they move towards Thurwar’s final fights, and meanwhile, a movement to stop the blood sport is trying to find traction.

There’s a lot packed into this novel, which uses a range of characters’ points of view to unfold the world of the narrative, a world both taken to extremes with the legal programme of prisoner gladiator death matches and not all that far away from the realities of the real life prison system and wider society, as footnotes throughout the book highlight with real facts and statistics. There’s plenty of the horror of the system, from the new methods of inflicting pain on prisoners to the ways in which every element of the Links’ lives is sold and televised as part of their agreement to be in the program. By combining many points of view, a lot of this detail can be organically shown throughout the book, rather than all the worldbuilding dumped at the start, and I appreciated this as it makes it much easier to get into the book.

The range of characters allow for a rich look into some of the nuances (I’ve seen other reviews calling everything too obvious or in your face, but for me there were plenty of small nuances), for example the experiences of two new Links being recruited into the program after torture at the prisons they were at, and the range of reasons why characters were imprisoned for so long in the first place. The book uses this to offer the reader ways in to thinking about abolition and restorative justice, and the fact that individuals do not have all the answers to this. At the same time, you get to see viewers of the show, both of the matches and the reality TV-esque parts which just follow the Links around in their Chain in between fights, and consider why people see it as okay to watch such content.

The doomed love story between Thurwar and Staxx is another crucial element, providing a heart-wrenching ending and a story that will draw in people who may otherwise find the book too brutal. You don’t always see a huge amount of them together, but what you do see is the ways in which their relationship is bound by their circumstances and how those who run the Criminal Action Penal Entertainment programme use and profit from their queerness as well as their strength as fighters. There’s also, unsurprisingly given that the book is about incarceration, a lot around race and who is imprisoned, and tensions that exist when people lack freedom.

There’s a lot to take in with Chain-Gang All-Stars, with a lot of perspectives and a long build up to its final confrontations, but it manages to be a powerful book that hurts on a character and a structural level. Being a high concept and brutal book, it won’t be for everyone, but I appreciated how it wove together so much and still had an atmospheric final moment as an ending.