The Danger Game (Paperback)

Alice and Louise are sisters united by a distant tragedy - the house fire their brother lit and burnt to death in, fourteen years ago. Alice teaches dirt-poor students at a state high school that the government wants to close, and she pursues an episodic, estranged relationship with a married man. Louise, a habitual liar and recovering heroin addict, has been playing 'the danger game' since she was a child, and she can't stop. But when Louise decides to unravel the truth about her twin brother's death, and seeks out the mother who abandoned her as a ten-year-old, everything changes. With preoccupations reminiscent of Elliot Perlman, The Danger Game is a work of literary realism, told through three voices in a pared-back style laced with black humour. It is at once an unsentimental account of deprivation and resistance, and a critique of the human cost of untrammelled economic rationalism.