1975 Modern dystopian classic by J.G. Ballard (1930 - 2009). 200 pages.
Jacket blurb:
"A new forty-story luxury apartment building is both location and protagonist of this gripping and unforgettable novel. With amenities that include its own movie theater, swimming pools, supermarket, and elementary school, the building offers a self contained world of comfortable living for its 2,000 tenants.
It is only with full occupancy that the residents' repressed antagonisms begin to break through the surface, at first in such half-playful occurrences as the dropping of debris from the top floors onto the balconies below. Then, in rapid retaliatory succession, violence breaks out in the halls and stairways, children are abused, a dog is drowned in a swimming pool, and a rich jeweler flung to his death from his penthouse. Tenants separate into three rival groups relative to the level of their apartments, and and inexorably all are carried back into a kind of stone-age primitivism. We follow about a dozen lives through this terrifying process -- in particular, the architect who designed the building and lives on its top floor, a middle-echelon doctor who first realized what is going on and gives himself up to its new logic, and a TV producer from the bottom floor who determines to fight his way to the top. By a strange paradox they continue with their lives in the world outside as if nothing is amiss, clinging all the while to the hope of making sense of the technological landscape they have helped to create, even as it crumbles around them.
Reminiscent of William Golding's Lord of the Flies, High-Rise is a masterfully enacted vision of human violence and regression, a novel that will reverberate in this minds of its readers long after its shocking conclusion."
Free Audiobook:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTJVpsLSLYo
Free PDF:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nUh7TpWMI-VTfzA1sx9Lltvu-anuPS4f/view?usp=sharing
