"The explosive, hotly-anticipated debut novel from the New York Times-bestselling author of Friday Black, about two top women gladiators fighting for their freedom within a depraved private prison system not so far-removed from America's own. Loretta Thurwar and Hamara "Hurricane Staxxx" Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly-popular, highly-controversial, profit-raising program in America's increasingly dominant private prison industry. It's the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom. In CAPE, prisoners travel as Links in Chain-Gangs, competing in death-matches for packed arenas with righteous protestors at the gates. Thurwar and Staxxx, both teammates and lovers, are the fan favorites. And if all goes well, Thurwar will be free in just a few matches, a fact she carries as heavily as her lethal hammer. As she prepares to leave her fellow Links, she considers how she might help preserve their humanity, in defiance of these so-called games, but CAPE's corporate owners will stop at nothing to protect their status quo and the obstacles they lay in Thurwar's path have devastating consequences. Moving from the Links in the field to the protestors to the CAPE employees and beyond, Chain-Gang All-Stars is a kaleidoscopic, excoriating look at the American prison system's unholy alliance of systemic racism, unchecked capitalism, and mass incarceration, and a clear-eyed reckoning with what freedom in this country really means from a "new and necessary American voice" (Tommy Orange, New York Times Book Review)"--

Biographical Note:
NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH is the New York Times-bestselling author of Friday Black. His work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Esquire, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. He was a National Book Foundation's "5 Under 35" honoree, the winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the Saroyan Prize, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Award for Best First Book, along with many other honors. Raised in Spring Valley, New York, he now lives in the Bronx.

Review Quotes:
NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK BY: New York Times, Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, Goodreads, Elle, Oprah Daily, Buzzfeed, Cosmopolitan, The Root, Essence, Salon, Seattle Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Huffington Post, WBUR's "Here and Now", The Week, Men's Health, YahooLife, Sunset Magazine, Lit Hub, Book Riot, Tor.com, CrimeReads, The Everygirl, The Millions, Lit-Reactor, Our Culture, Republican American , Women's Wear Daily, Daily Press, Columbia Daily Tribune, The Independent, Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus

*May Selection for The Today Show's Read With Jenna Book Club*
*Roxane Gay's May Selection for the Audacious Book Club*

"This book will change you!...A masterpiece."
--Jenna Bush Hager, The Today Show's #ReadWithJenna

"An act of protest...in a voice that belongs only to Adjei-Brenyah, who bends the lurid into the lyrical--pretty words about hideous deeds. Some of his best fight sentences sound as if Joe Rogan had fallen into a trance and assumed the diction and rhythms of Toni Morrison. If you recoil at that unholy fusion, that's kind of the point; and the author keeps pulling off this shock, page after page...There's more than a little George Saunders in these high jinks...The novel is a thorough display of authorial control...As the plot careers forward, Adjei-Brenyah uses footnotes as tethers between fiction and reality, reminding us that his gladiatorial farce is just a little tragicomic leap from an extant American horror...The society in which [these characters] live defines them by their worst deeds, but the writer of this novel refuses to."
--New York Times Book Review

"Like Orwell's1984and Atwood'sThe Handmaid's Tale, Adjei-Brenyah's book presents a dystopian vision so upsetting and illuminating that it should permanently shift our understanding of who we are and what we're capable of doing...So raw and tragic and primal isChain-Gang All-Starsthat despite its futuristic elements, it has the patina of some timeworn epic...Shockingly intimate and moving."
--Washington Post

"So shocking and moving that it might just wake us up."
--Ron Charles, CBS' Sunday Morning

"GladiatormeetsMad Maxat the penal colony in the brutal, world-building latest from Adjei-Brenyah"
--Entertainment Weekly

"Chain-Gang All-Starssurpasses all expectations...Adjei-Brenyah's acerbic vision lands like a lightning bolt of truth."
--Esquire

"Vividly imaginative and startling in its clarity of intent...A sort ofThe Hunger GamesmeetsGladiatormeets WWE meets the modern private prison system."
--Elle

"Chain-Gang All-Starsis an extension of everything Adjei-Brenyah does so well: juggle love with death, satire with pain, the impossible with the possible...In ballad-like chapters, which move with the speed and emotional care of anime fight scenes, Adjei-Brenyah weaves a world of sci-fi torture and bloody profit, but a world not totally scrubbed of hope. In doing so, he doesn't reinvent the genre novel so much as make it his own. The new maestro of dystopian lit has arrived."
--Wired

"A complex, brutal, beautiful, panoramic takedown of the prison-industrial complex... At once original, its own fresh creation, and clearly part of a lineage of American literature that links the opening 'Battle Royal' chapter in Ralph Ellison'sInvisible MantoNative Sonby Richard Wright,Soul on Iceby Eldridge Cleaver andSoledad Brotherby George Jackson...Adjei-Brenyah's distinguished novel updates this tradition to encompass our dizzying, barbaric, performative and capitalistic digital age."
--Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"[A] ferocious debut novel...[An] indicting commentary on a nation unmoored from its morality...Adjei-Brenyah does not flinch. Neither does he miss his targets, because he has the stiff winds of history at his back...WithChain-Gang All-Starshe lets us think we're reading a satire, but soon reveals a mirror of our dystopian days that lie not too far away."
--Boston Globe

"A clear-eyed critique of our country's prison system, along with the profit and racism inherent in them."
--Salon

"A visceral, heart-wrenching read that treats systemic issues with delightfully speculative skepticism and broken people with compassion and dignity."
--Shondaland

"One of the most exciting young writers in America. His work is urgent, engaging, wildly entertaining, formally bold, and politically electrifying. Read one page, any page, and you'll see what I mean."
--George Saunders, author ofLiberation Day

"A cross betweenGladiatorandThe Hunger Games...[An] acclaimed master of our futuristic nightmares...a keen observer of racial and socioeconomic disparities that result in a high number of Black people incarcerated. While this is set in the future, it feels uncomfortably close to the present."
--Oprah Daily