Mobility
Lydia Kiesling°°°
Bunny Glenn believes in climate change. But she also likes to get paid.
The year is 1998, the End of History. The Soviet Union is dissolved, the Cold War is over, and Bunny Glenn is an American teenager in Azerbaijan with her Foreign Service family. Through Bunny's eyes we watch global interests flock to the former Soviet Union during the rush for Caspian oil & pipeline access, hear rumbles of the expansion of the American security state & the buildup to the War on Terror.
We follow Bunny from adolescence to middle age--from Azerbaijan to America--as the entwined idols of capitalism & ambition lead her to a career in the oil industry, & eventually back to the scene of her youth, where familiar figures reappear in an era of political & climate breakdown.
Both geopolitical exploration & domestic coming-of-age novel, Mobility is a propulsive & challenging story about class, power, politics, & desire told through the life of one woman--her social milieu, her romances, her unarticulated wants. Mobility deftly explores American forms of complicity & inertia, moving between the local & the global, the personal & the political, & using fiction's power to illuminate the way a life is shaped by its context.
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Mobility is a truly gripping coming-of-age story about navigating a world of corporate greed that’s both laugh-out-loud funny & politically incisive.”— JON FAVREAU, JON LOVETT, & TOMMY VIETOR, CROOKED MEDIA READS
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Lydia Kiesling is the author of The Golden State, a 2018 National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree, a finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, & longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker online, & The Cut, among other outlets. She lives in Portland, OR.