Meanwhile in Dopamine City
It鈥檚 a big bad world out there, in Dopamine City. All Lonnie Cush wants is to keep his kids safe. But Shelby-Ann 鈥� his little girl, the maddening apple of his eye 鈥� has other ideas: Shelby-Ann wants her first smartphone. So new realities are rocketing their way to 37 Palisade Row, where everything will change, every day, and at mortal speed. Until Lonnie finds himself in a stitch: he鈥檒l have to join this new world, or wither in it. Or can he mastermind a vanishing act? The story of a hapless father鈥檚 love and loss, and a speedball, starburst satire, Meanwhile in Dopamine City is a passionate, freewheeling work from the winner of the Booker Prize: a riotous cry for the soul and the flesh and the heart in the cooling bathwater of our automatic times.
About the author
DBC Pierre is the author of Ludmila鈥檚 Broken English, Lights Out in Wonderland and Vernon God Little, which won the Man Booker Prize, the Whitbread Prize for Best First Novel, the Bollinger Wodehouse Everyman Award and the James Joyce Award.
The judges on the shortlist
Frances Wilson on Meanwhile in Dopamine City
Lon Cush, the hero of DBC Pierre鈥檚 turbo-charged satire, is a grieving widower struggling to hold on to his job and his kids. His nine year-old daughter, Shelby, is addicted to her phone and Lon is warring against millennials, vloggers, memes, likes, and allegations of parental abuse. The cacophony of this new binary world is demonstrated by a split page, one half giving us the stream of chatter displayed on Shelby鈥檚 screen, the other half the stream of thoughts running through Lon鈥檚 head. Furious, despairing, and dizzingly articulate, Meanwhile in Dopamine City shows that the novel is still smarter than the latest smartphone.