The Mandibles have been counting on a sizable fortune filtering down when their 97-year-old patriarch dies, but now their inheritance is turned to ash. This apocalypse is financial – the dollar is in meltdown, America’s national debt far beyond repayment. In this eerily prophetic novel from the Orange Prize-winning author of We Need to Talk About Kevin, a once-wealthy family faces the prospect of ruin. In most major cities, stockpiling of family packs was rife, leading to chronic shortages and gouging… It still makes me anxious.Then there was the emotionally charged issue of toilet paper. And now I make more money, and I worry about worldwide economic collapse. And when I was not doing all that well, I would worry about not being able to pay my modest rent. I think we all have a certain setting in terms of how much we worry about anything, really, but say, how much we worry about money. I used to be bored to death by economics, and then I started reading about it, and I have to say, it's fascinating. Or doormen no longer carry groceries for the elderly.

you walk into a restaurant and the maitre d' does not see you to your table, but just waves at it. it's not all at once, it's not, you flip a switch and suddenly people are dog-eat-dog and regard everything in a Darwinian, animalistic way. I wanted to record civil breakdown by degrees. So to begin with, my characters are a little distressed that the price of imported olive oil has gone up.'īook Reviews 'So Much' For Paradise: Battered By Bad Insurance But the key to writing this book, I discovered, was to control the scale and not to let things fall apart too quickly. 'And of course that means that the value of the dollar starts to slide. 'Nobody wants to give you money if you're not going to pay it back,' she says, so the government has had to print more money to cover its obligations. It's a dystopia with a side of economic theory.Īuthor Lionel Shriver tells NPR's Linda Wertheimer that in the world of 2029, the U.S. They plummet from the relative luxuries of the upper middle class to a small Brooklyn townhouse where four generations of the family must crouch together, enduring a life of hardship, drudgery, and eventually, violence. The Mandible family loses their fortune after the 2029 crash. and Mexico is meant to keep impoverished Americans north of the border.

economy has tanked, the dollar is worthless, inflation is rampant - and the wall between the U.S. Lionel Shriver's new novel, The Mandibles, chronicles the pressure on a once well-to-do family as they try to survive in the uncertain future. How?įor the last couple of months, we've brought you our series, Hanging On, about the increasing pressure on the middle class in 2016.

Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Mandibles Subtitle A Family, 2029-2047 Author Lionel Shriver

The mandibles a family 2029 2047