The Game
Izzy Abrahami
September 14, 2021
ISBN 9780578964317 / Paperback / 200 pages / $15.99

Originally published in the United States in 1973 by Charles Scribner's Sons, Izzy Abrahami's The Game returns in this new edition as an unsettling work of psychological fiction. This satiric fable begins when a bored man, gazing from his balcony at the lit and darkened windows of a housing complex, invents a game by assigning meaning to their patterns. What starts as a private diversion soon expands, as he and his wife refine the game by observing the lives unfolding behind the windows. Interest in the game spreads rapidly, revealing both the absurdity and the collective appetite of modern society for surveillance, spectacle, and meaning where none was intended.

"Once you pick it up, you can't stop reading it. . . . There's nothing like it in our experience and yet you like it at once."
— Walter James Miller, Reader's Almanac, WNYC

"I have read this novel with pleasure and admiration. It is beautifully contrived, ingenious, economical, thoroughly convincing. It is also witty and civilised, and . . . must earn a kind of astonished applause."
— Anthony Burgess

"Izzy Abrahami is a natural storyteller. The Game is delicious satire: droll, rather sneaky, always intelligent. It is a fine first novel. It is also what it beholds, a game, and as such is great fun."
— Israel Horovitz