The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047

Shriver does a good line in biting social commentary, attacking the U.S health care system in So Much for That and the obesity epidemic in Big Brother Here she aims at Atwood style near future speculative fiction and takes as her topic the world economy This could have been fun, but there are a few big problems Worst is the sheer information overload tons of economic detail crammed into frequent, wearisome conversations One character is an economics professor, another a teenage prodigy who spout [...]

Will try and keep it brief.Five main issues three big, two small.1 Previously covered material.2 Finance.3 Too many characters4 Sci fi.5 The future of the novel.1 So Much For That did healthcare, Big Brother did uncomfortable house guests, A Perfectly Good Family did inheritance all this comes back with weaker insights than before.2 External forces can be an interesting device if they sometimes enter a story to create havoc hurricanes, floor opens up to lava pit, asteroid kills lover etc But her [...]

Music The Smiths Back To The Old House my pinterest page created for this book SPOILERS fi.pinterest liisahietari It s 2029 Five years after Stonage , when all electricity was lost for a long time, the US national debt finally wipes out the dollar, causing chaos for years We follow the story of the Mandible family already declining family, rich due to some ancestors engine designs how it lost pretty much almost everything except some glasses and silver knives , how it survived and how it changed [...]

In The Mandibles A Family, 2029 2047, Lionel Shriver posits a world in which the economy of America has collapsed and Mexican born President Alvarez is leading the country but not the free world In 2024, there was a catastrophe when the electrical grid failed and there was no power to be had Cars and planes crashed and the Internet no longer existed Water was scarce and the infrastructure crumbling There was widespread looting and rioting Most of the world switched to a new currency, the bancor, [...]

There are so few few books I ve dnfed so close to the end, which shows they achieve a special kind of badness This is one of the most painful books I ve ever attempted, the characters are totally flat, moral spiritual values nonexistent, every episode uniformly dreary It s a shame because I expect the author s basic economic and social beliefs are pretty close to mine, the dystopia she creates with a 77% rate of income tax and the United States reduced to the level of a third world country likel [...]

The Buck StopsLionel Shriver s new novel, The Mandibles A Family 2029 2047 is captivating, and at the same time a humorous and chilling work of speculative fiction Early on, one of Shiver s characters, in referencing the works 2001 A Space Odyssey and 1984 , says Plots set in the future are about what we fear in the present They re not about the future at all Since this particular character turns out to be extremely wrong about a lot of things, I take this as a wink to the reader that Shriver be [...]

As always, Shriver s books are challenging, harsh and thought provoking I found some of the financial detail a bit hard going, and it s hardly a feel good book, but it was darkly funny at times and I would recommend.

This book tells the tale of the economic collapse in the US in 2029 Cabbage is 20 a head The robots were once called bots but they ve taken over so many jobs, they re now called robs Showers are taken once a week to save water There s a new global currency, the bancor The US President announces that the government is defaulting on all loans Banks shut down and accounts are frozen Inflation is out of control leading to chaos The government demands that citizens turn over all gold to them Unfortun [...]

This book was fantastic It has all the qualities I look for in a book First, the writing is great, full of witty, droll, sarcastic, darkly comic one liners with some nuggets of wisdom to them One of my favorites people who follow the rules are almost always punished Also the novel employs an amusing set of future slang that I found amusing The words boomerpoop and roachbar just might pop into my own vocabulary, even if no one else gets it Secondly, the book has a lot of wisdom to impart and it s [...]

Lionel Shriver, I decided, is essayist than novelist Though I loved loved loved We Need to Talk About Kevin, and I definitely appreciated The Post Birthday World, the rest of her books have felt like glorified and often sanctimonious rants that are frankly annoying to read.The Mandibles is a finance driven treatise about a new kind of apocalypse rather than zombies or religious uprising, the new president defaults on America s loans and now there is a scarcity to everything and the whole world [...]

I was so pleased to have won a copy of The Mandibles A Family, 2029 2047 in a recent First Reads Giveaway This was a very enjoyable read, even though it took me a while to finish It was the kind of book that I preferred to read when sitting in my library room alone, when family were not around It is the first time that I have any of Lionel Shriver s books and will now be on the lookout for Recommended.

Sometimes a bit too heavy on the economics Shriver wants to get across, but the story is inventive Satirical and quite funny at times And above all, in typical Shriver fashion, an unusual view on the ethics of the economical crisis it portrays the good guys are not so good after allAll in all, not the best Shriver novel, but worth a read nevertheless.

Lionel Shriver is not for everyone That said, I need to read Lionel Shriver She s just my latest girl crush And one of the most important authors out there when it comes to igniting healthy debate and challenging authority and the status quo In the four novels I ve read of her 13, she s tackled the U.S health care system So Much For That , obesity Big Brother , the nature vs nurture debate the absolutely riveting, 5 star We Need To Talk About Kevin , and now, via the all too plausible dystopian [...]

This is easily the best novel that I ve read this year You probably know the story in broad strokes In one sense, it s a renegade economics textbook presented in the form of a novel with brilliantly realized characters In another sense, it s a form of doomer porn, or to use the author s own coinage, it s an example of apocalyptic economics I don t think this is necessarily a prophetic book The eventual economic melt down of the USA might not result from a cabal of competitor nations cooking up a [...]

This book is an interesting read albeit with some problems Unlike many of the reviewers I didn t object to the economic details per se but instead found the concept of a post apocalyptic novel purely based on a crisis caused by loss of collective faith in the financial system fascinating Humanity doesn t need zombies, an asteroid or a plague to fall apart, the ingredients are really already there That said I found the core principles here a little off putting, at times it seems like the author i [...]

Gasps I ve long waited to read Lionel Shriver and the recent release of The Mandibles presented me the perfect opportunity to start working on her oeuvre Having just finished reading it, I m still gasping for my breath It feels as though I m back from a particularly arduous underwater expedition But I m immense glad I read it If I were Willing or any other character from the book, I d describe it as Malicious.The Mandibles is stratospherically ingenious and a particularly heavy read It took me a [...]

Shriver We Need to Talk About Kevin is back with a fantastic near future novel about the effects of an economic collapse on four generations of a once prosperous family The Mandibles have always relied on the sizable family fortune, but when the U.S engages in a bloodless war that wipes out the nation s finances, they must scramble to make ends meet, igniting old rivalries and jealousies.Backlist bump The Post Birthday World by Lionel ShriverTune in to our weekly podcast dedicated to all things [...]

Ms Shriver hasn t disappointed me yet and I was glued to this very scary book about the crash of the American economy I don t think anyone could fail to see this as a real possibility Dropped a point for the slightly lack lustre closing chapters but read it if you can.

Absolutely brilliant The author writes with great wit and humor about a fictional family, the Mandibles, in the year 2029 I would describe this novel as semi post apocalyptic the US is facing a crisis caused by the lack of faith in the very foundation of its financial system The US government defaults on all its debt and orders all gold to be recalled, the dollar is essentially worthless and replaced by the bancor as the globally preferred currency, and inflation grows so rampant that a head of [...]

This book dragged It got bogged down in tirades and treatises and pontification But what a concept The US economy implodes It is the poor cousin instead of the rich uncle Economic order breaks down completely, and law and order soon follow, but only in the US The story follows members of a family waiting for the obscenely rich patriarch to die, and then all of a sudden the emperor has no clothes, or money, or assets They adapt in different ways You won t read an economic diatribe or hear about t [...]

Cuatro generaciones de los Mandible comprueban, unos con incredulidad, otros con resignaci n, como la econom a estadounidense colapsa No hay marcha atr s y de ser una primera potencia mundial ha pasado a un paria internacional El vuelco social, psicol gico y emocional que esto supone para los personajes, cada uno de los cuales lo afronta en la medida de sus posibilidades es el leit motivo de este impresionante libro en el que Shriver parece sacar, tras una investigaci n exhaustiva, sus conclusio [...]

I am glad I took accounting classes along with working in the computer lab in college when I pick up books like this Lionel Shriver, the author of The Mandibles , is obviously an intelligent writer who has kept up with current dotcom drawing board schemes and Kickstarter inventors of new products beyond cellphones and tablets but this densely written, post scarcity science fiction novel about an impoverished 2029 2047 United States is also a great example of a talent to postulate knowledgeably a [...]

I got up to page 332 which is than this book deserves It s very boring, and full of dull and stilted dialogue about finance Just as it got interesting and some actual plot happened, the book leapt forward in time The characters are a snooze too, and Shriver s slang is lame uncruel boomerpoop roachbar And there was a bunch of racism in there that I don t think can be justified.

This was almost a five for me I almost put it down early on because of the sheer volume of information used to set up this world and this family I m glad I didn t I ended up loving the family and it s dynamics and her near future world was fascinating.

Too much of an agenda to be a good novel.

A few things can be said to have formed a cult around Lionel Shriver in the past few years, especially since the watershed publication of her 2003 novel We need to talk about Kevin By and large, readers have followed Shriver s fictional production on account of 1 her unique repertoire of topics, i.e her keen interest in sensitive social issues obesity, healthcare, gun control, marriage , and 2 her virtually matchless narrative voice, ever present sarcasm, and good ear for particularly stinging p [...]

The name of this book is evocative It brings to mind a skull, a chomping mechanism, a piece of primal human equipment The dates take us into the future The cover image is of a US 100 note behind a glass museum cover And it of course references a family dynasty the Mandible family.I liked this book despite its obvious didacticism In another writer it would annoy me Shriver says of this book that she believes that our society dodged a bullet in 2008 when the GFC occurred She believes that that bul [...]

I received a free proof copy I have read and enjoyed Lionel Shriver before However I do not read dystopian novels set in the future very often so have little to compare it with I prefer the Michel Faber and Margaret Atwood I have read though to this one It is perhaps not fair to compare This is set in the near future and is unsettling in that the outcomes can almost be seen on the horizon from our perspective here and now She does not pull any punches at times this is quite visceral I did root f [...]

The Mandibles is both a story and a backstory of an economic dystopia The story is that of the titular family, thrown into an economic crisis As a novel, it s witty and engaging, though imperfect There are too many characters, resulting in only a few complexly drawn ones and too many nonentities The plot moves unevenly through the time span on this later However, there is a good eye towards the mundane details Food, water, toilet paper When Shriver stops showing you how much effort she has put [...]

My conclusion after reading this book is that, although the prose is sometimes impenetrable, the story is chilling The foundation for everything that happens is real, in the here and now, in our world The story is terrifyingly plausible, in that the events seem likely to happen But the prose is heavy with economic theory that seems too placed, telling the reader things we need to know, in endless dreary dialogue, and not for the advancement of plot or for character development It also riled me t [...]