Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.
Title: Game Control
Author: Lionel Shriver
Narrator: Laurel Lefkow
Format: Unabridged
Length: 10 hrs and 18 mins
Language: English
Release date: 06-01-17
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Limited
Genres: Fiction, Contemporary
Publisher's Summary:
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.
Critic Reviews:
Praise for Lionel Shriver:
"One of the most magnetically compelling writers working today. Witty, caustic and worldly." (Wall Street Journal)
"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)
"Shriver is an incisive social satirist with a clear grip on the ironies of our contemporary age." (LA Times)
Members Reviews:
A Modest Proposal for the 21st Century
While reading Lionel Shriver's Game Control, I kept thinking about this quote from Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal: "I think it is agreed by all parties that this prodigious number of children in the arms, or on the backs, or at the heels of their mothers, and frequently of their fathers, is in the present deplorable state of the kingdom a very great additional grievance; and therefore whoever could find out a fair, cheap, and easy method of making these children sound, useful members of the commonwealth would deserve so well of the public as to have his statue set up as a preserver of the nation.
"But my intention is very far from being confined to provide only for the children of professed beggars; it is of a much greater extent, and shall take in the whole number of infants at a certain age who are born of parents in effect as little able to support them as those who demand our charity in the streets." This certainly sounds like a sound bite that could have issued from the mouth of Shriver's anti-hero Calvin Piper.
I came to Game Control after having earlier read her later, and masterful novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin. Game Control is an earlier novel, and certainly shows Shriver as a talent. Here, the talent is needing more polish. In fact, the whole novel felt that it was about to implode, though not from a want of ideas. In Kevin, Shriver effectively uses an old-fashioned form, the epistolatory novel, at a time when letters seem so out of date. Who writes letters in the age of email and text messages? But reservations evaporated after 20-30 pages, with letters adding a certain suspense to the plot. Shriver's timing is perfect. And though told from only one point of view, the narrator comes across as reliable, and the tension between husband and wife is believable.
We have something of the same sense of tension playing out between the two main characters in Game Control. Eleanor Merrett is a rather spineless woman, working for a non-profit NGO in sub-Saharan Africa, working on behalf of poor women with the aim of family planning.
