Chain-Gang All-Stars

Chain-Gang All-Stars is a furious, tender, and propulsive novel about a carceral America that has turned punishment into primetime sport. On the Circuit, incarcerated people—called Links—fight to the death for corporate sponsors, Blood Points, and the faint hope of High Freedom. Loretta Thurwar, a near-mythic champion with a war hammer named Hass Omaha, and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker, a scythe-wielding phenomenon, have built a family inside the machine and a love that lets them tell the truth. But the machine studies them back. Protestors gather outside arenas. Executives calculate ratings inside boardrooms. A single rule change promises the biggest event in hard action-sports history: two Colossals from the same Chain must fight each other.

Across stadiums, vans, camps, and after-hours BlackOuts when the cameras go dark, we meet men and women who sing in solitary, organize in the shadow of corporate logos, and hold each other steady when the world won’t. A young activist puts her body on the line. A father asks for a last kind of mercy. And two women choose how to live in a space designed to make living impossible.

This 30-minute narrative distills the novel’s beating heart. We trace the rise of Thurwar and Staxxx, the protests swelling outside the gates, the boardroom math that calls itself justice, and the last walk to a field where love steps toward the unthinkable—and reframes it.

• Fiction lovers who want a propulsive story with a moral heartbeat
• Listeners curious about abolition, carcerality, and how systems become culture
• Book clubs ready to argue about love, spectacle, and what we owe each other

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is the bestselling author of Friday Black and a winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. His work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Esquire, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. A National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree, he writes with urgency about America’s fault lines—race, punishment, capitalism—and the people who live at those intersections. He grew up in Spring Valley, New York, and lives in the Bronx.