A Better World
A Novel
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
A cunning, outside-the-box satirical thriller about a family’s odyssey into an exclusive enclave for the wealthy that might not be as ideal as it seems.
You’ll be safe here. That’s what the tour guide tells the Farmer-Bowens when they visit Plymouth Valley, a walled-off company town with clean air, pantries that never go empty, and blue-ribbon schools. On a very trial basis, the company offers to hire Linda Farmer’s husband, Russell, a numbers genius, and relocate her whole family to this bucolic paradise for the .0001 percent. Though Linda will have to sacrifice her medical career back home, the family jumps at the opportunity. They’d be crazy not to take it. With the outside world falling apart, this might be the Farmer-Bowens’ last chance.
But fitting in takes work. The pampered locals distrust outsiders, snubbing Linda, Russell, and their teen twins. And the residents fervently adhere to a group of customs and beliefs called Hollow...but what exactly is Hollow?
It’s Linda who brokers acceptance, by volunteering her medical skills to the most influential people in town through their pet charity, ActHollow. In the months afterward, everything seems fine. Sure, Russell starts hyperventilating through a paper bag in the middle of the night, and the kids have become secretive, but living in Plymouth Valley is worth sacrificing their family’s closeness, isn’t it? At least they’ll survive. The trouble is, the locals never say what they think. They seem scared. And Hollow’s ominous culminating event, the Plymouth Valley Winter Festival, is coming.
Linda is warned by her husband and her powerful new friends to stop asking questions. But the more she learns, the more frightened she becomes. Should the Farmer-Bowens be fighting to stay, or fighting to get out?
Sarah Langan’s latest novel, A Better World, is gleefully ruthless in its dissection of wealth, power, and privilege, timely in its depiction of a self-destructing world—and it is a prescient warning to us all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the near-future world where Bram Stoker Award winner Langan's ambitious latest (after Good Neighbors) takes place, climate disaster and rampant crime have transformed life into a struggle for survival. For Brooklyn's Farmer-Bowen clan, salvation beckons when patriarch Russell, a scientist recently laid off from the EPA, is offered a trial position at South Dakota's Plymouth Valley, one of a handful of "company towns" that are the only remaining safe spaces on the planet. The oasis, constructed decades earlier by eco-engineering firm BetterWorld, seems like a golden ticket: as long as new employees pass an annual review, BetterWorld provides them with housing, transport, food, and clothing. As Russell's pediatrician wife, Linda, and their teenage twins attempt to fit into their new surroundings, Linda comes to worry that Plymouth Valley is too good to be true. Unfailingly polite but uniformly remote, the locals give her a sinister, Stepford Wives vibe, regularly snubbing her and the twins—and that's before she begins asking questions about a series of opaque neighborhood customs known as "Hollow." Blending suspense, tragedy, and flashes of comedy, Langan keeps her cards close to the vest as the Farmer-Bowens' perfect escape morphs into a sinister trap. This deeply disturbing tale will keep readers up at night.
