Mania

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Set in a parallel yet all too familiar near past, a brilliant subversive novel from the Sunday Times bestselling author about a lifelong friendship threatened by the Culture Wars
The year is 2011, but not the 2011 we know. The Mental Parity movement has taken hold and 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; smart phones are rebranded. Children are expelled for saying the S-word (stupid) and encouraged to report parents who use it at home.

Pearson and Emory, who have been best friends since childhood, find themselves on opposite sides of a widening chasm of opinion: Pearson believes the whole thing is ludicrous, but as a radio personality Emory chooses to go with the flow of popular thought and is soon making increasingly hardline statements to that effect.

As the friendship fractures, Pearsons insistence on the old way of thinking endangers her job, her safety and even her family. Can the balance ever be reset

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.

Reviews

Praise for Lionel Shriver:

I think Shrivers novels are wonderful fun, smart and, perhaps because of their authors unconventional political views, unlike anything else youll read Financial Times

Shriver has the magic ability to make the reader invested in the fate fates, I should say of her characters Daily Telegraph

Some books become so popular that the lucky author can thereafter churn out any old cobblers, confident in the knowledge that it will be published and find an audience. Lionel Shriver never took that easy route Irish Independent

[A] brutally fearless writer Anne Fine, i paper

An independent mind and a sense of humour are dangerous things to possess. The spiky, politically incorrect novelist Lionel Shriver has them in abundance The Times

Author Bio

Lionel Shriver's novels include the National Book Award finalist So Much for That, the New York Times bestseller The Post-Birthday World, and the international bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin. Her journalism has appeared in the Guardian and the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and many other publications. She lives in London and Brooklyn, New York.