> Skip to content
  • Published: 15 September 2016
  • ISBN: 9781616957650
  • Imprint: Soho Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $32.99

Scrapper



For fans of The Dog Stars and Station Eleven, Scrapper uses the real-life dystopia of a devastated Detroit serves as a backdrop for one man's desperate quest for justice and redemptive grace

For fans of The Dog Stars and Station Eleven, Scrapper traces one man’s desperate quest for redemption in a devastated Detroit.

"Has the feel of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road set in present-day Motor City... powerful."
Publishers Weekly

Detroit has descended into ruin. Kelly scavenges for scrap metal from the hundred thousand abandoned buildings in a part of the city known as “the zone,” an increasingly wild landscape where one day he finds something far more valuable than the copper he’s come to steal: a kidnapped boy, crying out for rescue. Briefly celebrated as a hero, Kelly secretly avenges the boy’s unsolved kidnapping, a task that will take him deeper into the zone and into a confrontation with his own past and long-buried traumas.

The second novel from the acclaimed author of In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, Scrapper is a devastating reimagining of one of America’s greatest cities, its beautiful architecture, its lost houses, shuttered factories, boxing gyms, and storefront churches. With precise, powerful prose, it asks: What do we owe for our crimes, even those we’ve committed to protect the people we love?

  • Published: 15 September 2016
  • ISBN: 9781616957650
  • Imprint: Soho Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $32.99

Also by Matt Bell

See all

Praise for Scrapper

Praise for Scrapper

"Equal parts dystopian novel, psychological thriller, and literary fiction, [Scrapper] evokes a dark and lonely existence for its stoic protagonist...By the novel's end, Bell adeptly depicts Kelly as a complicated soul capable of great violence and kindness."--The New York Times Book Review

"A fearless and harrowing meditation on the ruination and transformation of cities and of people; but amid loss and destruction, Bell finds a strain of piercing hope. This is an extraordinary book."--Emily St. John Mandel, New York Times bestselling author of Station Eleven

"This haunting story is juxtaposed with Bell's fierce lyricism, creating a stirring and noir-ish novel that reflects on the nature of emptiness, ruin and renewal."--The Detroit Free Press