From the bestselling and award-winning novelist, Octavia E. Butler. Completing the Patternist series, a new edition of her cult classic novel, now in print for the first time in fifty years.

When Alanna flees a plague-scarred Earth to a new planet, she believes she has found a peaceful new home for humanity. Instead, she finds herself caught between two battling civilisations - the Kohn and Tehkohn.

Now she must play a dangerous game to survive.

Make alliances, while plotting betrayals. Assimilate, while retaining her humanity. Open her heart, while risking everything.

Alanna knows that the mission of her fellow colonists is to preserve the human race. But what if the best way to retain her humanity is to leave it all behind?

A PATTERNIST NOVEL

This long-awaited new volume includes new essays from scholar and the Huntington Library's Octavia E. Butler Fellow, Alyssa Collins, along with 'A Necessary Being' - the only short fiction set in the Patternist universe, completing the Patternist series for readers everywhere.

‘So über-zeitgeisty that it might have been written this morning, yet it is far more than merely topical or trendy, as deep moral, political, social, cultural, architectural and lingual problems collide throughout this short novel. A contemporary gem.’ Spectator

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 – Sympathy Tower Tokyo.

Acclaimed architect Sara Machina has been tasked with designing the city's new centrepiece, but is riven by doubt. Haunted by a terrible crime she experienced as a young girl, she wonders if she might inherently disagree with the values of the project, which should be the pinnacle of her career. As Sara grapples with these conflicting emotions, her relationship with her gorgeous – and much younger – boyfriend grows increasingly strained. 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.

'A bold interrogation of crime, punishment and redemption' Economist

'Stuns and illuminates. 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, author of Memorial

'A brilliantly ambitious struggle and mediation on language, thought and existence. A wondrous book', Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Chain-Gang All-Stars