Welcome to the Japan of tomorrow. Here, the practice of a radical sympathy toward criminals has become the norm – and a grand skyscraper in the heart of Tokyo is planned to house wrongdoers in compassionate comfort. Acclaimed architect Sara Machina has been tasked with designing the city's new centrepiece, but is riven by doubt. As she casts her mind to the terrible crime she experienced as a young girl, she wonders if she might think against the grain of her time: could it be that criminals deserve the punishment and disdain of the past? In search of solace, in need of creative inspiration, Sara turns to the knowing words of an AI chatbot…
Awarded Japan's highest literary prize, Sympathy Tower Tokyo is an extraordinary novel from one of the most exciting new voices in world literature. Partly inspired by conversations with an artificial intelligence, it offers an extraordinary defence of the power of language written by humans, a touching exploration of the imaginative impulse, and an often hilarious send up of our modern world's unrelenting conformity.
Genre: Science Fiction
Awarded Japan's highest literary prize, Sympathy Tower Tokyo is an extraordinary novel from one of the most exciting new voices in world literature. Partly inspired by conversations with an artificial intelligence, it offers an extraordinary defence of the power of language written by humans, a touching exploration of the imaginative impulse, and an often hilarious send up of our modern world's unrelenting conformity.
Genre: Science Fiction
Praise for this book
"Sympathy Tower Tokyo is a brilliantly ambitious struggle and mediation on language, thought and existence. It considers the implications and limitations of language in a way I've never seen before. In these considerations is offers a new paradigm through which we might reimagine incarceration and the idea of so-called 'criminality.' A wondrous book." - Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
"Sympathy Tower Tokyo by Rie Qudan is unlike any book I've ever read. This brief, mesmerizing novel explores the ways we shape our spaces and the ways our spaces shape us. I was struck by its wit and its wisdom, its structure and its subversiveness, and I consumed it in a single gulp." - Helen Phillips
"SYMPATHY TOWER TOKYO stuns and illuminates. Qudan's characters are as complex and present as the worlds they inhabit - and her protagonist, Sara Machina, is original beyond measure. SYMPATHY TOWER TOKYO is an ode to language and possibility and the ongoing question of how to be in an ever-changing world." - Bryan Washington
"A haunting excursion into the space between words and reality. This novel is a marvel of precision engineering: compact, multi-layered, with unobstructed views on society, present and future. A unique construction that slowly envelops the reader to show from the inside the tower of language that imprisons us. Stimulating, unsettling, an ingenious piece of work." - Charles Yu
"Sympathy Tower Tokyo by Rie Qudan is unlike any book I've ever read. This brief, mesmerizing novel explores the ways we shape our spaces and the ways our spaces shape us. I was struck by its wit and its wisdom, its structure and its subversiveness, and I consumed it in a single gulp." - Helen Phillips
"SYMPATHY TOWER TOKYO stuns and illuminates. Qudan's characters are as complex and present as the worlds they inhabit - and her protagonist, Sara Machina, is original beyond measure. SYMPATHY TOWER TOKYO is an ode to language and possibility and the ongoing question of how to be in an ever-changing world." - Bryan Washington
"A haunting excursion into the space between words and reality. This novel is a marvel of precision engineering: compact, multi-layered, with unobstructed views on society, present and future. A unique construction that slowly envelops the reader to show from the inside the tower of language that imprisons us. Stimulating, unsettling, an ingenious piece of work." - Charles Yu
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