A Cure for Suicide A Novel [Paperback]

***LONG-LISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD***

A man and a woman have moved into a small house in a small village. The woman is an examiner, charged with teaching the man a series of simple functions—this is a chair, this is a fork, this is how you meet people. Still, the man is haunted by strange dreams, and when he meets a charismatic, volatile young woman named Hilda at a party, it throws everything he has learned into question. What is this village? And why is he here?

A fascinating novel of love, illness, despair, and betrayal,A Cure for Suicideis the most captivating novel yet from one of our most audacious and original young writers.“Spellbinding . . . [Has] the simplicity of a fable and the drama of a psychological thriller.” —The New York Times Book Review  
  
“One of the finest things Ball has ever written, a magical, gripping burst of emotional history.” —Chicago Tribune 
 
“War doesn’t exist anymore, and neither do prisons, in the seemingly not-so-distant future where Jesse Ball’s magnetic, suspenseful, occasionally heart-rending fifth novel,A Cure for Suicide,unfolds…. Hypnotic.” —The Boston Globe
 
“[A Cure for Suicide’s] tone and soft, murky edges make me think of the Gilead of Margaret Atwood'sThe Handmaid’s Tale—a place where it’s the quiet that haunts you, the incredibly short distances between the real and the fictional.” —Jason Sheehan, NPR

 “Captivating. . . . Ball’s lean, clinical prose puts us in mind of Samuel Beckett, and his heady concoction of unsettling atmosphere, sterile environments and authorial obfuscations and distortions is redolent of the potent brew that powered recent dark fables from Chang-rae Lee and Howard Jacobson. . . . Refreshingly unl¢