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 episodi 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 that abandoned her as a ten-year-old- everything changes. 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. The Danger Game is an unsentimental account of deprivation and resistance, and a critique of the human cost of untrammelled economic rationalism. This is a novel about damage: the damage we do to each other and the damage the world can do to us.
