Draft:The Divers' Game

The Divers' Game is a 2019 dystopian novel by American novelist Jesse Ball, published by Ecco.

Synopsis
In a dystopian future, an unnamed country brands its refugees with tattoos and relegates them to "quadrants", areas outside cities where no laws are followed. The "quads", as this group is called, are at the mercy of "pats", official citizens who are taught to gas them. The story, styled as a series of vignettes told by a teacher, is set during two observances: Ogias' Day, in which "pats" use debt forgiveness as a tool for national unity; and the quads' Day of the Infanta, where violence and chaos loom.

Themes
The novel's titular game urges its players "to swim from one interconnected lake to another through a deep tunnel without drowning". Chelsea Leu of The New York Times Book Review compared the events of Game to contemporary border crises in the United States.

Reception
The staff of Kirkus Reviews wrote that The Divers' Game "[is] imaginatively horrifying, even if it doesn't always make sense, and readers who appreciate Ball's keen, melancholic, and often sadly satirical view of human society will likely appreciate this timely assessment of where division might take us and how it affects the generations that come after us." Donna Seaman of Booklist said, "Writing with blood-freezing sparseness, Ball illuminates this calamitously immoral place in loosely linked episodes." Publishers Weekly called it "[an] atmospheric, occasionally mesmerizing tale of haves and have-nots [in spite of the] stilted exposition".