“Jesse Ball is a writer of formal mysteriousness and neon moral clarity… His language is spare, strange, and evocative…. His themes are human savagery, often state-sanctioned, and human kindness, a thin thread of resistance…. The final section [of The Divers’ Game] is breathtaking.” — The New Yorker

“A book that contemplates, with the gravity and grace it deserves, a world beyond the point of no return….. Stunning…. The book’s final section, in which a woman confronts the violence within herself, is one of the more beautiful things I’ve ever read.” — Paris Review

“It’s hard to read a book like ‘The Divers’ Game’ — in which an unnamed nation receives an influx of refugees and abandons the notion of human fellow feeling — and not immediately think of the present moment…. [An] interlocking puzzle box of a novel, artful and often inscrutable… The society in ‘The Divers’ Game’ uses rituals like festivals and games to paper over its own violence. They merely reveal how untenable that violence is.” —