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[10], 402, [4] pages. Slight creasing along the top of the dust jacket This

[10], 402, [4] pages. Slight creasing along the top of the dust jacket This brilliantly witty and insightful novel, set in near-future America, follows four generations of a once-prosperous family as they navigate the aftershocks of a devastated U.S. economy brought on by a national debt crisis--one that will seem all too frighteningly realistic. The author has a knack for conveying subtle shifts in family dynamics; her main gift as a novelist is a talent for coolly nailing down uncomfortable realities. In this book, she brings the full power of her creative imagination to bear on a topic that seeps into every corner of our lives: money. Using her ability to nail the zeitgeist, her droll humor, and her psychological insight, she has created an unforgettable and engrossing fictional world. Lionel Shriver (born Margaret Ann Shriver; May 18, 1957) is an American author and journalist who lives in the United Kingdom. Her novel We Need to Talk About Kevin won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2005. Shriver had written eight novels and published seven (one novel could not find a publisher) before writing We Need to Talk About Kevin, which she called her "make or break" novel due to the years of "professional disappointment" and "virtual obscurity" preceding it. The novel was "not science fiction", Shriver told BBC Radio 4's Front Row on May 9, 2016. It is an "acid satire" in which "everything bad that could happen...has happened" according to the review in the Literary Review. Derived from a Kirkus review: Shriver, nobody's idea of an optimist about the present day, delivers a dire vision of near-future America. The collapse of the United States arrives in 2029, not via climate change or airborne viruses or zombie hordes, but international monetary policy: foreign governments establish their own currency, the bancor (a concept first proposed by economist John Maynard Keynes), and when the U.S. resists, it's effectively locked out of global trade. America speedily goes into free fall, with rampant shortages and inheritances vaporized by high costs, unemployment, and human longevity. The Mandible family is just barely hanging on: Florence, who has one of the few stable jobs left, is forced to open her Brooklyn home to desperate family members, including a humiliated economist brother-in-law, a sister whose career as a novelist tanked along with all print media, and her once-wealthy grandfather who has only a silver service left to his name and whose second wife suffers from violent dementia. Almost gleefully, Shriver catalogs how this upper-middle-class clan gets knocked off its perch in ways both small and large. Politically, this may be the only novel Mother Jones and Breitbart can both take an interest in, though it might tire them both, too: the closing chapters, set in a scorched-earth 2047, are overly didactic on themes of individual rights, taxation, and citizenship. Shriver's biggest fear is that, between numbing technology and nanny-statedom, we've lost our capacity to live by our wits. This novel is a bracing vision of what happens when we're forced to do so. An savvy commingling of apocalyptic and polemic.