The Dimensions of a Cave

Named a Best Book of 2023 by The New Yorker

A virtuoso journey into networks of power, our embroilment with new technologies, and the dangers of corruption, by an electrifying debut novelist.

When the investigative reporter Quentin Jones’s story about covert military interrogation practices is buried, he is spurred to dig deeper and unravels a trail that leads to VIRTUE: cutting-edge technology that simulates reality during interrogation.

As the shadowy labyrinths of governmental corruption unfurl and tighten around him, unnerving links to his protégé Bruce--who, like Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz, disappeared into the war several years earlier--keep emerging.

Greg Jackson’s The Dimensions of a Cave explores our drive toward war, violence, and venality, placing humanity and idealism under the spotlight.

Greg Jackson is the author of the story collection Prodigals, for which he was included in the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 and received the Bard Fiction Prize. In 2017, he was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. His fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, Tin House, Vice, Conjunctions, Virginia Quarterly Review, the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Guardian, among other places. The Dimensions of a Cave is his first novel.