Paperback, 150 pages

English language

Published by AK Press.

ISBN:
978-1-84935-452-3
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5 stars (2 reviews)

A tale of what happens when we can no longer ignore what has been lost in this world.

Grievers is the story of a city so plagued by grief that it can no longer function. Dune’s mother is patient zero of a mysterious illness that stops people in their tracks—in mid-sentence, mid-action, mid-life—casting them into a nonresponsive state from which no one recovers. Dune must navigate poverty and the loss of her mother as Detroit’s hospitals, morgues, and graveyards begin to overflow. As the quarantined city slowly empties of life, she investigates what caused the plague, and what might end it. In anguish, she follows in the footsteps of her late researcher father, who has a physical model of Detroit’s history and losses set up in their basement. She dusts the model off and begins tracking the sick and dying, discovering patterns, finding comrades in curiosity, conspiracies for the fertile …

2 editions

Excellent Beginning to a Trilogy

5 stars

The most common comparison is Parable of the Sower, but the closer comparison in my opinion is Ling Ma’s Severance. Their setups are similar, a disease of unknown origin and behavior begins to wipe out urban populations, and both work as easy metaphors of the real pandemic, with all the fear and unknowing that we felt reflected back onto us from the protagonists.

The differences are tonal. Severance's Candace found her purpose in documenting the newly found emptiness of New York, and her moniker of "NY Ghost" reflects the ephemeral nature of her journey. Sans any defined methodology, she comes to embody a ghost in light steps and intermittent shots, posting online to an unknown number of survivors. The disconnect is the point.

Grievers' Dune's journey feels like the inverse. She's starts as a ghost, an outsider, and it takes the events unfolding to find her place in the world, …

Review of 'Grievers' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Un très joli roman d'anticipation, où un étrange syndrôme mortel frappe les habitants noirs de Detroit. C'est l'occasion pour l'autrice de nous parler de deuil, d'inégalités raciales, de gentrification, et de dédadence du capitalisme. Le style est fluide et poétique, on se laisse emporter par une plume qui accompagne parfaitement un récit qui oscille entre tragédie, pessismisme et optimisme.