THE MANDIBLES: A FAMILY, 2029-2047

From the incomparable bestselling author and Orange Prize-winner Lionel Shriver comes a major novel about three collapses: first monetary, then national, and finally, as conditions go from bad to catastrophic, the collapse onto itself (and into one house) of an extended family forced to find common ground for their common good.

It’s 2029. The New York Times is long gone and 9/11 is the distant memory of a previous generation. In a special televised announcement, United States President Alvarado announces that his country will default on its crushing debts after a coalition of foreign governments reveal the creation of an international currency to rival the almighty dollar. To Florence Mandible, a social worker in Brooklyn, her live-in boyfriend Esteban, and her quiet and precocious son Willing, the dire news sounds momentous but feels distant; the presidential address is a companionable occasion for ice cream. Yet in short order, the family fortune on whose trickle-down the whole family has been counting is wiped out. As national financial crisis translates inexorably into personal financial crisis, a family of four generations and multiple nuclei find themselves compressed together in a house where explosions of a domestic and emotional variety seem increasingly anodyne when compared to what’s going on outside the walls. Meanwhile, far to the west, a few homesteaders and liberty-seekers have established what they’re calling the United States of Nevada, and rumor is they’ve struck gold... Lionel Shriver’s novels include Big Brother, The New Republic, the National Book Award finalist So Much for That, the New York Times bestseller The Post-Birthday World, and the Orange Prize-winner We Need to Talk About Kevin. Her journalism has appeared in the Guardian, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. She lives in London and Brooklyn, New York.