The High-Rise Diver - Paperback

by Julia Von Lucadou (Author), Sharmila Cohen (Translator)

For readers of The Handmaid's Tale, The Circle, and Brave New World comes a chilling and distressingly plausible dystopia which creates a world in which performance is everything and one woman's failure to achieve becomes another's downfall.

Front Jacket

Riva is a "high-rise diver," a top athlete with millions of fans, and a perfectly functioning human on all levels. Suddenly she rebels, breaking her contract and refusing to train. Cameras are everywhere in her world, but she doesn't know her every move is being watched by Hitomi, the psychologist tasked with reining Riva back in. Unquestionably loyal to the system, Hitomi's own life is at stake: should she fail to deliver, she will be banned to the "peripheries," the filthy outskirts of society. For readers of The Handmaid's Tale, The Circle, and Brave New World, this chilling dystopia constructs a world uncomfortably close to our own, in which performance is everything.

"What makes Julia von Lucadou's novel so impressive is the accuracy with which she describes this high-gloss, modern, but by no means completely fictional world. Every detail is so precise that, lurking beneath the flawlessness of the text, the central theme of perfidious self-optimization seems to always be present." --Süddeutsche Zeitung

"Julia von Lucadou's science fiction is close. Against the backdrop of the gleaming images used to portray this Orwellian-style city-state, the tragic moments of direct human encounters take on a dimension of clever criticism." --Spiegel Online

Back Jacket

Riva is a "high-rise diver," a top athlete with millions of fans, and a perfectly functioning human on all levels. Suddenly she rebels, breaking her contract and refusing to train. Cameras are everywhere in her world, but she doesn't know her every move is being watched by Hitomi, the psychologist tasked with reining Riva back in. Unquestionably loyal to the system, Hitomi's own life is at stake: should she fail to deliver, she will be banned to the "peripheries," the filthy outskirts of society. For readers of The Handmaid's Tale, The Circle, and Brave New World, this chilling dystopia constructs a world uncomfortably close to our own, in which performance is everything.

"What makes Julia von Lucadou's novel so impressive is the accuracy with which she describes this high-gloss, modern, but by no means completely fictional world. Every detail is so precise that, lurking beneath the flawlessness of the text, the central theme of perfidious self-optimization seems to always be present." --S?ddeutsche Zeitung

"Julia von Lucadou's science fiction is close. Against the backdrop of the gleaming images used to portray this Orwellian-style city-state, the tragic moments of direct human encounters take on a dimension of clever criticism." --Spiegel Online

Author Biography

JULIA VON LUCADOU was born in Heidelberg in 1982. She studied film and theater at Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz and Victoria University of Wellington and earned her PhD in Film Studies in 2015. Lucadou worked as both an assistant director and a television editor prior to writing The High-Rise Diver, her debut novel, which was nominated for the Swiss Book Prize in 2018. She splits her time between Biel, New York, and Cologne.

Originally from New York, SHARMILA COHEN came to Berlin in 2011 as a Fulbright Scholar to complete an experimental translation project with local poets. She now divides her time between both cities. Cohen is an award-winning writer and German-to-English translator who has translated the works of several leading German-language authors. Her work has been featured in publications such as BOMB and Harpers, and her projects span from poetry and literary fiction to crime and children's stories.