America, in short, is now a Third World country, it’s people turning on one another, fighting for food, shelter, life itself.
A chillingly plausible global financial crisis has eroded his fortune, as well as the rest of America, and left them no longer able to rely on the ‘American Dream’ of growing wealth, prosperity, global leadership and and a rosy future. The Mandibles are a family once comfortably well off and looking forward to inheriting a sizeable fortune from the patriarch, Grand Man Douglas, but now facing up to a complete and utter change of circumstances. I especially loved the name of the family – the Mandibles…chewed up and spat out? It’s full title gives it away – ‘A Family 2029-2047’, years that sound so far ahead of us but are, in reality, not far away. This is like the Forsyte Saga for the 21st Century, but written ahead of its time. It is astonishing, like every book of Lionel Shrivers I have read, and it seemed to me to have a particularly deep relevance given the current circumstances globally – at the time of writing, we are nine months into the Covid-19 pandemic – who among us really saw that coming? and a few weeks out from the American Presidential Biden-Trump elections, which, without diving too deeply into my personal views on politics, are incredibly important to all of us living on this planet, and I think many of us are holding our breath and waiting to see what happens.īut, I digress. I do not think it would be an exaggeration to say this this is the most disturbing, the most enthralling, and one of the best written books I have pulled from Mum’s library this year.
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