The Repeat Room, Jesse Ball
The Repeat Room, Jesse Ball
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

The Repeat Room
A Novel

Author: Jesse Ball

Narrator: Erik Bloomquist

Unabridged: 4 hr 32 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/24/2024


Synopsis

Franz Kafka meets Yorgos Lanthimos in this provocative new novel from one of America's most brilliant and distinctive writers

In a speculative future, Abel, a menial worker, is called to serve in a secretive and fabled jury system. At the heart of this system is the repeat room, where a single juror, selected from hundreds of candidates, is able to inhabit the defendant's lived experience, to see as if through their eyes.

The case to which Abel is assigned is revealed in the novel's shocking second act. We receive a record of a boy's broken and constrained life, a tale that reveals an illicit and passionate psycho-sexual relationship, its end as tragic as the circumstances of its conception.

Artful in its suspense, and sharp in its evocation of a byzantine and cruel bureaucracy, The Repeat Room is an exciting and pointed critique of the nature of knowledge and judgment, and a vivid framing of Ball's absurd and nihilistic philosophy of love.

About Jesse Ball

Jesse Ball was born in New York. He is the author of sixteen books, and his works have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He is on the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has won the Paris Review's Plimpton Prize for Fiction, and was long-listed for the National Book Award. He was named one of Granta's Best of Young Novelists, and has been a fellow of the NEA, Creative Capital, and the Guggenheim Foundation.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Lark on September 26, 2024

An incredible reading experience. The audiobook narration by Erik Bloomquist is so extraordinary that I’m not embarrassed to use the term ‘tour de force.’ The book itself is risky and wild and dives into the incomprehensible and then, reaches poetry. The first half, I’m in total agreement with the pu......more

Goodreads review by The Speculative Shelf on February 13, 2024

A searing and harrowing portrait of the criminal justice system of a dystopian future. Utterly enthralling and thought-provoking. The Repeat Room features the most starkly contrasting halves of a novel that I can remember. The first half details the criminal justice system of a dystopian future, one......more

Goodreads review by Ashley on October 16, 2024

(immediately after finishing I'd rated 3.5/5, rounded up. now, I feel like this deserves the full 4/4 because of how cohesively it's stuck w me (I usually forget the majority of a book within a few days ngl), there's very little I'm unable to recall from this one) This could have taken 87265 other tu......more

Goodreads review by Brooke on October 08, 2024

first 60% was great, was really feeling the Sci-Fi/crime vibe, then the incest started, and that was all the rest of the book offered. if you do the audio at 3x speed, the narrator really sounds like he's in a manic state trying to explain away the crimes......more

Goodreads review by Yahaira on October 07, 2024

That got disturbing......more