In 2029 – a century on from the first Great Depression – Douglas is sitting pretty in his plush care home on a family fortune built two generations earlier from the manufacture of diesel engines. Through the four generations of the Mandible family (their curious name carrying connotations of being chewed up), she explores what financial ruin looks like to those who have the most to lose from it. With The Mandibles: A Family 2029-2047, she turns that unsparing focus on the economy, following the present precariousness of the global markets to its logical conclusion – a near future in which the dollar collapses, America is relegated from superpower to pariah state, and civilisation all but breaks down.

Shriver too has always had the eye – an unflinching gaze trained on aspects of contemporary American life most of us prefer not to look at for too long, from teenage violence in We Need to Talk About Kevin to the obesity crisis in Big Brother, by way of the US healthcare system in So Much for That. He’s speaking in 2031 of his daughter, Nollie, a former bestselling author back in the days when people still paid for books, but his words could apply equally well to their creator. So says 99-year-old Douglas Mandible, patriarch of the titular family in Lionel Shriver’s 13th novel. For most people, what lies outside our front door is tragedy. “T here’s a great book in this upheaval, and she’d be the ideal chronicler of the times.

The mandibles a family