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In a provocative novel addressing contemporary immigration by the sharply observant Lionel Shriver, a New York family takes in a Honduran migrant—who may or may not be the innocent paragon she claims to be.
Gloria Bonaventura, a divorced mother of three living with her 26-year-old son Nico in a sprawling house in Brooklyn, decides to participate in a new city program that would pay her to take in a migrant as a boarder. Liberal to the extreme, Gloria is thrilled when sweet, kind, helpful Martine arrives. But Nico is skeptical. A classic live-at-home Gen Zer with no interest in adulthood, Nico resents any interruption of his "hovercraft repose."
As the months go by, Martine endears herself to both Nico's sisters, while finding her way into Gloria's heart and even, briefly, Nico's. But as Martine's disturbingly dodgy compatriots begin to show up, Nico conceives a dark twin hostile to both his mother's altruism and the "migrant crisis" in general—and turns out to be anything but a reliable narrator himself.
Based loosely on a program New York City Mayor Eric Adams floated but did not initiate, A Better Life is Lionel Shriver at her best: smart, funny, and sensitive to the moral nuances of perhaps the most divisive issue of our times.
"Here, though, she's persuaded that savaging liberal pieties represents a brave stance, when this rehash of The Camp of the Saints is just hackneyed paranoid xenophobia. Her worst book, by a wide margin." —Kirkus Reviews
"[E]ven readers who appreciate anti-woke provocations will be left scratching their heads. It's a mess." —Publishers Weekly
This information about A Better Life was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jerry Bauer
Journalist and author Lionel Shriver was born Margaret Ann Shriver in 1957 in
North Carolina, USA. She changed her name to Lionel at the age of 15 because she
wanted to distance herself from the "girl with the pink ribbons in her hair, who
married her high-school sweetheart and became an apple-cheeked housewife" that
she felt was implied by the name Margaret Ann and the expectations of her
family.
She received a BA and MFA from Columbia University and, since then, has lived
in Nairobi, Bangkok, Belfast (where she reported on the Troubles for 12 years)
and London.
Her first novel, The Female of the Species, was published when she was
29 (1986), and was followed by Checker and the Derailleurs (1987),
Ordinary Decent Criminals (1990), Game Control (1994), A ...
Name Pronunciation
Lionel Shriver: LIE-uh-nuhl SHRIVE-er
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