All Involved
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
"A high-octane speedball of a read: gritty, nerve-racking, sometimes excruciating in its violence and at the same time animated by a bone-deep understanding of its characters' daily lives." Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
The 1992 Los Angeles Riots: six days of looting, arson, assault and murder. America's second largest city in chaos.
In All Involved, Ryan Gattis weaves a heart-stopping narrative from the perspectives of people whose stories of the riots were never told. In six sections, each covering a single day, we follow the intersecting lives of eighteen characters: gang members, firefighters, nurses, law enforcement officers and graffiti artists, every one changed for ever.
Inspired by unprecedented access to the inner workings of the gangs at the heart of these extraordinary events, Gattis channels their experiences into a cinematic tale that is shocking and devastating. Though the events of All Involved are fictional, every word is infused with authenticity and intimacy.
With the velocity of a thriller and the command of an incredibly adept writer, All Involved, an epic story of race, revenge and loyalty, announces the arrival of a major new talent.
MORE PRAISE FOR ALL INVOLVED
"Simultaneously empathetic and unsparing" New Yorker
"A tour de force . . . without glamorising his subject, there's a lyricism in the vernacular and street language that makes it hard not to be moved . . . a powerful work of fiction" GQ
"The Wire meets Quentin Tarantino on the set of 24 ... All Involved offers that most difficult and nebulous thing in fiction: it reads true." Financial Times
"Audacious, unflinching and subversive ... It swallowed me whole." David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Two years' worth of interviews with gang members, nurses, firefighters and other Los Angeles residents went into the writing of this hard-hitting novel, which captures the chaos and anguish that engulfed the city in the spring of 1992. After Rodney King’s assailants were acquitted, the world bore witness to televised reports of the ensuing riots. But writer Ryan Gattis chooses to train his vision on the violence that erupted outside of the public eye, in the vacuum created by the mass mobilisation of the city’s police force. Forceful as a fist and glinting with hard truths, All Involved fictionalises a shameful side of urban American life that remains all too relevant today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in South Central Los Angeles in 1992, during the six days of rioting sparked by the Rodney King verdict, this violent, visceral novel from Gattis (Kung Fu High School) chronicles the intersecting lives of a diverse cast of characters caught up in the chaos, from business owners and nurses to drug dealers and gang members, the last of whom use the anarchy as an opportunity to take vengeance on those who have done them wrong. The narrative is replete with disturbing imagery like a firefighter getting his face crushed by a cinder block but the emotionally detached tone lessens the impact. In the end, this isn't a story about the events of the L.A. riots or even the people involved it's about the city and its ability to rise from the ashes and re-create itself into "something broken and pretty and new." Like the historical events it's based on, this page-turner is horrific, heartrending, and maybe just a bit hopeful.
