The Mandibles have been luckier than most – “While crude survival from one day to the next might be every human’s animal goal, for generations the Mandible family had managed to dress up the project as considerably more exalted” – but this is brought to a swift, sharp end when the fortune the younger generations have been counting on inheriting when 97-year-old Douglas Mandible departs this world, is wiped out.
Sprinkled with just enough speculative inventions to hint towards something Atwoodian – a workforce displaced by robs voice-activated household management systems self-driving cars and increasingly Orwellian levels of state control and surveillance – this is also a world in which the once glorious United States is now teetering on the edge of complete financial meltdown, crippled by national debt and with the dollar in free-fall. Having, in previous works, explored the evils of the present – from high school shootings to the American health care system – Lionel Shriver’s ambitious but flawed new novel, The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047, takes an America of the near future as its subject.
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