High Rise – J.G. Ballard
‘Living in high-rises required a special type of behavior, one that was acquiescent, restrained, even perhaps slightly mad. A psychotic would have a ball here.’
Welcome to the high-rise, a brand-new way of living designed for a modern world. Stretching forty floors into the sky, residents have everything they could wish for – from the brash filmmaker at the bottom to the lauded architect himself at the top. But when modern man of medicine Dr Robert Laing moves in, his grip on reason is soon tested to breaking point. As the foundations of civilisation itself begin to crumble, cocktail parties give way to brutal raids and once-luxurious amenities become arenas for violence in this unsettling orgy of barbarity and primal chaos.
The Age of Reason – Jean-Paul Sartre
The first volume in his Roads to Freedom trilogy, Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Age of Reason is a philosophical novel exploring existentialist notions of freedom, translated by Eric Sutton with an introduction by David Caute in Penguin Modern Classics.
Set in the volatile Paris summer of 1938, The Age of Reason follows two days in the life of Mathieu Delarue, a philosophy teacher, and his circle in the cafés and bars of Montparnasse. Mathieu has so far managed to contain sex and personal freedom in conveniently separate compartments. But now he is in trouble, urgently trying to raise 4,000 francs to procure a safe abortion for his mistress, Marcelle. Beyond all this, filtering an uneasy light on his predicament, rises the distant threat of the coming of the Second World War.
The Marriage Plot – Hiromi Kawakami
In the distant future, humans are on the verge of extinction and have settled in small tribes across the planet under the observation and care of the Mothers. Some children are made in factories, from cells of rabbits and dolphins; some live by getting nutrients from water and light, like plants. The survival of the race depends on the interbreeding of these and other alien beings – but it is far from certain that connection, love, reproduction, and evolution will persist among the inhabitants of this faltering new world.