Mobility by Lydia Kiesling
An Elle Most Anticipated Book of 2023
A LitHub Most Anticipated Book of 2023
Recommended Summer Reading by NPR, Bustle, Vulture, and San Francisco Chronicle
A propulsive novel about class, power, politics, and desire by the celebrated author of The Golden State.
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 living 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 and pipeline access, and hear rumbles of the expansion of the American security state and the buildup to the War on Terror. Both geopolitical exploration and domestic coming-of-age novel, Mobility is a propulsive and challenging story about class, power, politics, and desire told through the life of one woman—her social milieu, her romances, her unarticulated wants. Mobility deftly explores American forms of complicity and inertia, moving between the local and the global, the personal and the political, and using fiction’s power to illuminate the way a life is shaped by its context.
“Mobility is a truly gripping coming-of-age story about navigating a world of corporate greed that’s both laugh-out-loud funny and politically incisive.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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, and longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker online, and The Cut, among other outlets. She lives in Portland, OR.
