The first English translation of celebrated Swiss-German novelist Sibylle Berg, Grime is a manifesto for fury, escape, and individual revolt…

Rochdale is a town in the deindustrialized northwest of near-future England; a town devoid of hope, where poverty and abuse are part of daily life, and kids are forced to grow up too quickly. Four local teenagers—the angry, martial-arts-obsessed Don(atella); Peter, the traumatized Polish boy; Karen, the technocratic girl with albinism; and Hannah, the orphan from Liverpool—don’t have much to bind them together. But they share a hatred for their lived reality, a love of grime—the subset of hip hop that has replaced punk as the music of the angry and dispossessed—and a determination to seek revenge on those they hold responsible for their misery. They create a hit list, and travel to London to make their own justice in an unjust world.

Sibylle Berg’s Grime is set in an age of massive disruption. The people of Britain are celebrating the introduction of a universal basic income, too dulled or distracted to realize that it is disguising the demolition of the welfare state and the death throes of liberal society. An avatar is elected prime minister, then an actor. Most citizens agree to be implanted with a chip that enrolls them in a “karma point system” that punishes anyone who deviates from the norm.

In London, the teenagers will encounter degenerate conservatives, conspiracy theorists, programmers vacillating between megalomania and impotence, cynical secret agents, Chinese power brokers, algorithms that have developed a life of their own, and multitudes of losers who spend their days reliving their own pathetic pasts by means of virtual reality. But what started out as a hit squad becomes a makeshift family as they attempt, with limited success, to create a home for themselves in an abandoned factory on the city’s outskirts. Will they see their plans through to the bloody end, or will they find something better to live for in the rubble?