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Game Control

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What to expect

From the Orange Prize-winning author of WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN comes a grimly comic tale of bad ideas and good intentions. With a deft, droll touch, Shriver highlights the hypocrisy of lofty intellectuals who would "save" humanity but who don't like people.

Eleanor Merritt, a do-gooding American family-planning worker, was drawn to Kenya to improve the lot of the poor. Unnervingly, she finds herself falling in love with the beguiling Calvin Piper despite, or perhaps because of, his misanthropic theories about population control and the future of the human race. Surely, Calvin whispers seductively in Eleanor's ear, if the poor are a responsibility they are also an imposition.

Set against the vivid backdrop of modern-day Africa, Game Control is a wry, sardonic conspiracy story about bad ideas and good intentions.

Critics Review

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Praise for Lionel Shriver:

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‘One of the most magnetically compelling writers working today. Witty, caustic and worldly’ WALL STREET JOURNAL

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‘A brilliant writer. She has a strong, clear and strangely seductive voice. The characters are strong . . . so moving it will make you want to gasp or cry’ SUNDAY TIMES

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‘Shriver is an incisive social satirist with a clear grip on the ironies of our contemporary age’
LA Times

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‘Shriver gives us another passionate novel…Like Sliding Doors, the tale splits into two, following the dramatic turns of each choice. Brilliant’
Cosmopolitan

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‘Terrific – a provocative tale of devotion, suffering, and other familiar accoutrements of love’ PEOPLE

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