The Mandibles can count on their inheritance no longer, and each member must come to terms with this in their own way-from the elegant ex-pat author Nollie, in her middle age, returning to the U.S.

The American President declares that the States will default on all its loans-prices skyrocket, currency becomes essentially worthless, and we watch one family struggle to survive through it all. In a coordinated move by the rest of the world’s governments, the dollar loses all its value. The very essence of American life, the dollar, is under attack. The year is 2029, and nothing is as it should be. Nevertheless, Shriver’s imaginative novel works as a mishmash of literary fiction and dystopian satire.From Lionel Shriver, the acclaimed author of the National Book Award finalist So Much for That and the international bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin, comes a striking new novel about family, money, and global economic crisis. Shriver’s ( Big Brother) vision has a few blind spots, and a time shift forces significant plot points to be recounted by characters later. What’s remarkable about the Mandibles is how poorly they adapt to the new normal, perhaps with the exception of Florence’s son, Willing, a teenager with prodigious knowledge of macroeconomics and a dismal worldview formed by the Stonage. Carter’s sister Avery and her economics professor husband, Lowell, and their three children arrive on the doorstep of her do-good sister Florence, whose job working for the homeless is more stable than Lowell’s academic career. Soon Douglas and his wife, Luella, are kicked out of their retirement community and begin bunking with his “boomerpoop” son, Carter (a journalist back when there were still newspapers), and his emotionally fragile wife, Jayne, in their Brooklyn brownstone. With wit and insight, Shriver details the impact of this new era on the Mandible clan, who are forced to come together to weather the crisis. And just like that, the inheritance of the Mandible family, created by an industrialist forebear and stewarded by patriarch Douglas, disappears. America’s response is to default on all its loans, including the T-bills held by American citizens. is once again under attack by a coordinated international effort to sink the dollar and replace it with a new global currency called the bancor. Now President Alvarado addresses the nation to deliver the news that the U.S.

Shriver’s latest opens in 2029, five years after a large-scale cyberattack called “the Stonage” destabilized the American economy and shifted all its transactions off-line.

The mandibles a family 2029 2047