With his first novel, "Chain-Gang All-Stars," Adjei-Brenyah has burnished this approach into a complex, brutal, beautiful, panoramic takedown of the prison-industrial complex, through the near-future story of a band of incarcerated neo-gladiators who entertain the nation with their televised, battle to-the-death arena matches in an elusive quest to gain their freedom.

If you are to read one book this year, make it this one. I'm writing this review the day after finishing the book because I still don't feel that I have adequate words to talk about it. Chain Gang All Stars is equal parts heartbreaking, horrifying, gripping, exhilarating, and reflective.

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, The New York Times Book Review).