Kipper's Game

by Barbara Ehrenreich Narrated by Molly Parker Myers

Overview

From the New York Times bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed comes a futuristic thriller about science, love, politics, and social disarray.

Della Markson is searching for her son, a brilliant, nihilistic computer hacker who has invented an addictive computer game. She teams up with her former professor, Alex MacBride, an academic has-been desperately in need of a publication and a drink, is looking for the papers of an obscure, long-dead neurobiologist. As they stumble through a suburban landscape littered with broken marriages and blighted careers, they discover that their personal quests are of great interest to mysterious others, and that they have been drawn into a grand design full of wondrous possibilities and perilous meanings.

For Della and Alex live in a hyper-real world of strange portents and accelerating decay. Caterpillars are destroying the trees. A cracked but eerily lucid evangelist preaches apocalypse on a pirate frequency. And in the renowned biological research institute where Della and Alex work, escaped laboratory animals roam the corridors, hazardous wastes leak unchecked, and a lethal new disease is outwitting the researchers. The search for Della's son and Alex's missing papers turns out to hinge on the ancient quest for the ultimate purpose of human intelligence and life.

A startling feat of the imagination from one of our sharpest social observers, Kipper's Game is a daring and sophisticated adventure at the interface of science and metaphysics, human love and the equally human hunger for knowledge.

Editorial Reviews

Library Journal

Known mostly for her social commentary in works like Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class ( LJ 8/89) and The Worst Year of Our Lives ( LJ 4/15/90), Ehrenreich has written her first novel. Who is Kipper and what is his game? Kipper is the son of Della Markson; he is also a computer hacker who has designed an ingenious but addictive computer game. Not having seen her son in a year, Della attempts to locate him. Paralleling her search and sometimes crossing it is Alex MacBride's quest for the papers of a little-known neurobiologist with possible Nazi ties. Ehrenreich's venture into a postmodern world with apocalyptic environmental dimensions is based on a wonderfully imaginative premise. However, readers may not find reading this novel as addictive as playing Kipper's game, which many players want to access no matter what the cost to life or limb. Recommended for large fiction collections. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/93.-- Fay A. Chadwell, Univ. of South Carolina, Columbia

From the Publisher

ORIGINAL PRAISE FOR KIPPER'S GAME:

"In an intriguing fusion of subject and style...Kipper's Game splices a treatise on knowledge into a spooky-music intellectual thriller."—Entertainment Weekly

"Wonderfully imaginative."—Library Journal

"Ehrenreich...makes full use of her Ph.D. in biology to create an America on the edge of environmental ruin and anarchy—where doomsday prophets and powerful corporate entities vie for control. Complex and convincingly bleak."—Kirkus

Product Details

BN ID:	2940173577580
Publisher:	Hachette Audio
Publication date:	01/07/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged

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