MANIA

Set in a parallel yet all too familiar near past, a brilliant subversive novel from the New York Times bestselling author about a lifelong friendship threatened by culture wars.

In an alternative 2011, the Mental Parity movement takes hold. Americans now embrace the sacred, universal truth that there is no such thing as variable human intelligence. Because everyone is equally smart, discrimination against purportedly dumb people is "the last great civil rights fight." Tests, grades, and employment qualifications are all discarded. Children are expelled for saying the S-word ("stupid") and encouraged to report parents who use it at home. A college English instructor, the constitutionally rebellious Pearson Converse rejected her restrictive Jehovah's Witness upbringing as a teenager, and so has an aversion to dogma of any kind. Made impotent in the university classroom, she's also enraged by the crushing of her exceptionally bright children's spirits in primary school. Fortunately, she enjoys the confidence of a best friend, a media commentator with whom she can speak frankly about her socially unacceptable contempt for the MP movement. Or at least she thinks she can... until one day the political chasm between the two women becomes uncrossable, and a lifelong relationship implodes. Lionel Shriver turns her piercing gaze on the policing of opinion and intellect and imagines a world - perhaps not too far removed from our own - in which meritocracy is heresy. Hilarious, deadpan and at times frighteningly plausible, MANIA will delight her many fans - this is a thought-provoking and scathing novel with a lot to say about modern life. Lionel Shriver's fiction includes Should We Stay or Should We Go; The Motion of the Body Through Space; The Mandibles; Property; the National Book Award finalist So Much for That; and the New York Times bestsellers The Post-Birthday World and We Need to Talk About Kevin, the international bestseller adapted for a 2011 film starring Tilda Swinton. Her journalism has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Harper's Magazine, and many other publications, and she is a regular columnist for The Spectator. She lives in London and Brooklyn.