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Mobility: A Novel

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National Bestseller Longlisted for the 2024 Joyce Carol Oates Prize A Powell’s Best Book of 2023 A TIME Best Book of 2023 A Vulture Best Book of 2023 “A masterpiece of misdirection.” ―Geraldine Brooks “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.” ―Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, and Tommy Vietor “Kiesling . . . has pulled off a rare feat: a deeply serious, deeply political novel that is, quite often, fun to read. It’s a coming-of-age story full of delicious detail, keen satire, and complex humanity.” ―Amy Weiss-Meyer, The Atlantic Bunny Glenn believes in climate change. But she also likes to get paid. The year is 1998. The Soviet Union is dissolved, the Cold War is over, and Bunny Glenn is a lonely American teenager in Azerbaijan with her Foreign Service family. Through Bunny’s bemused eyes, we watch global interests flock to her temporary backyard for Caspian oil and pipeline access, hearing rumbles of the expansion of the American security state and the buildup to the War on Terror. We follow Bunny from adolescence to middle age―from Baku to Athens to Houston―as her own ambition and desire for comfort lead her to a career in the oil industry, eventually returning to the scene of her youth, where slippery figures from the past reappear in an era of political and climate breakdown. Propulsive and thought-provoking, empathetic yet pointed, Mobility is a story about class, power, politics, and desire told through the life of one woman―her social milieu, her romances, her unarticulated wants. Through Bunny’s life choices, Lydia Kiesling masterfully explores American forms of complicity and inertia, moving between the local and the global, the personal and the political, and using fiction’s singular power to illuminate a life shaped by its context. Read more

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Crooked Media Reads


Accessibility ‏ : ‎ Learn more


Publication date ‏ : ‎ August 1, 2023


Language ‏ : ‎ English


File size ‏ : ‎ 2.6 MB


Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported


Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled


X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled


Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled


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Top Amazon Reviews

    • Entertaining intelligent page-turner!
Format: Hardcover
Great book. An intelligent, relatable protagonist takes us along on her own unique journey from a childhood living abroad with a father in the State Dept to a career she fashions for herself in the energy industry; we’re in on her hopes, fears, and growing self awareness. It’s an entertaining read that’ll have you searching online for images of Baku & Athens. If you’re like me, you’ll stay up too late reading this one. It draws you in. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on April 24, 2025 by KateM
    • A life tied to the oil industry
Format: Hardcover
*4-4.5 stars. Mobility is Lydia Kiesling's second novel and follows Elizabeth “Bunny” Glenn throughout her life. We first meet her in 1998 at the age of 15. She is currently living in Baku, Azerbaijan, with her father who is a career U.S. diplomat and her older brother, John. Her mother has returned to Texas with the baby brother, Teddy Bear, to help care for her aging mother. Bunny reads all the latest fashion magazines, like Cosmo, Vanity Fair and Vogue, for beauty advice and clues, because at this point in her life, she seems to believe a woman's worth is how attractive she is to a man. Baku is the current hot spot with its developing offshore oil business and has become a magnet for brash young men who want a piece of the action. Thankfully they seem to know Bunny is a bit TOO young to be toyed with. Later, in her 20s, she is still looking for her niche in life. Her parents have divorced and she moves in with her distraught mother who has inherited her family's home in Beaumont, Texas. Bunny's brothers are off busy doing their own things. She decides to sign on with a temp employment agency who send her to work a clerical job at a private oil services company. There she slowly works her way up. The changes in her job seem to coincide with the changes in the energy industry. Quite a bit of the novel is an informative discussion of the structure of the oil industry--who owns what, how the industry is changing. Of course, climate change becomes a bigger factor as the years pass. But also who are employed in these well-paying jobs. Women engineers are few and far between and Bunny finds herself helping organize women to network. I thought a lot about what the title means. Does mobility always mean improvement? You can be upwardly mobil because of receiving an education, through the job or profession you enter, through rising income, by the neighborhood you can afford to live in, and, in some cases, you might even move up in social class through the good fortune of these things. Consumerism rears its ugly head though and you might have to dress the part. Bunny remains obsessed with designer clothes, shoes and face creams throughout her life. As part of a diplomat's family, Bunny has lived in several countries around the world, went to schools in America, and came back to Texas to live as an adult, so the mobility of her living circumstances is part of what shaped her life. Her extended family ends up scattered across the globe and don't see each other that often. Is that a downside to mobility? Mobility is a part of modern life, as humans have the ability to travel across the globe and even into outer space. Gas and oil fuel that and many other of the commodities that make up our lives--electricity, heating, clothing, buildings, even food substances. Can alternatives to fossil fuels be found quickly enough to slow the problems caused by climate change? In the end, it may come down to what we truly need to live and what we can live without. Lots of fuel for thought here, pun intended. I received an arc from the author and publisher via NetGalley. Many thanks! My review is voluntary and the opinions expressed are my own. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on August 15, 2023 by bamcooks
    • As if Bridget Jones Wrote About Climate Change...
Format: Paperback
“Mobility” by Lydia Kiesling is the coming-of-age story of Bunny Glenn beginning when she was 15 and her family (Foreign Servies) was stationed in Baku, which is the capital of Azerbaijan, then through her years back in the US for college and finally a career in the oil industry in Houston. I guess it’s supposed to be semi-serious, but it’s like if Bridget Jones wrote a book about climate change and the (villainous) oil industry. There’s an awful lot about dieting and female body shame, sex and romance, fashion, hair and make-up, and lots of drinking. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on February 25, 2026 by Mary Lins
    • Wonderful book.
Format: Hardcover
This is a thought -provoking novel that explores both personal and political issues. I read all the time and this is one of my favorites.
Reviewed in the United States on September 3, 2023 by P. L. Bell
    • 3.5 level book
Format: Hardcover
This is a 3.5 star book imho. The writing I thought was very good and the subject matter are quite creative. It was so much meandering about this useless girls life- for 400 pages- it was all I could do to get through the last hundred pages. There was absolutely nothing compelling, interesting or wanting to cheer for any of the character characters in the book. They all just sort of muddled through life with zero self introspection. It was interesting to hear about people living as experts in oil rich countries. I hated the political bent of the author- which would’ve actually been fine/ excusable if she had truly explained the reason she hated Trump so much regarding oil. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on April 30, 2025 by Patterson Meade
    • Another excellent novel from Lydia Kiesling
Format: Kindle
I love everything Lydia Kiesling writes. I read her previous novel, The Golden State, as a new mom myself and was so moved by her ability to observe and describe ordinary moments that somehow no one has bothered to notice or articulate before. That goes for Mobility as well. I'm roughly the same age as Bunny, the protagonist, and Kiesling's descriptions of the social and societal forces that I was unconsciously experiencing as a teenager are just devastating. She uncannily captures the feeling of discomfort/shame/pride/self-consciousness of being a teenage girl in the late 1990s. That same insightfulness is applied on an incredibly ambitious scale to both the specific times and places Bunny moves through in the book and, well, capitalism and the global economy! This may be a strange comparison, but the novel reminds me of the show Mad Men. We see an epochal shift through the lens of a specific protagonist, who is somehow sympathetic and unlikable all at once. A protagonist who has a fascinatingly slippery way of believing that life is something that happens to them and avoids looking too closely at their own accountability for their choices and actions. Ultimately, the novel makes you think about the moral trade-offs we all make because we live in a society and makes you think about your own complicity in looming environmental devastation without being condescending or preachy. Read this book! ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on August 11, 2023 by AZ
    • A deeply researched and thoroughly enjoyable novel of the modern oil age
Format: Hardcover
Mobility begins in the late 1990s at the American embassy in Azerbaijan. That's where bored teenager Bunny Glenn endures a summer with her father, who is posted there with the U.S. Foreign Service. It's also where Bunny begins to learn about the geopolitics of oil—although much of her attention is focused on fashion, boys and other age-appropriate obsessions. Bunny is modeled after the character of the same name from Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!, one of Kiesling's main influences for Mobility. The novel follows Bunny into adulthood as she ends up in Texas working in the oil and gas industry herself. The novel is a deeply researched account of the global consequences of extractive industries as well as a sly look at the political currents of Bunny's youth, at the misguided "lean in" message of the Sheryl Sandberg era and how it all shaped the woman she becomes. Although Bunny is singular as a character, she stands in for the complicity of her class and generation as they face climate change. Mobility has parallels to the global nomad elites of Intimacies by Katie Kitamura and the coming-of-age story in The Idiot by Elif Batuman. And of course, readers who've read Oil! will appreciate Kiesling's allusions to the classic work. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on August 1, 2023 by Erika Bolstad
    • A woman's journey through global energy geopolitics
Format: Hardcover
Thanks for NetGalley for the eARC. I inhaled this book. I loved the main character, even though she is objectively kind of boring. The author does a very good job of combining global politics with the quotidian life of an embassy brat who is trying to figure out and make her way in the world. Like all of us, Bunny, the MC, is subsumed by the needs of her ego: the right cosmetics and a job that validates her. She is a good person that cannot grasp the abstractions that are leading to the destruction of the planet. This is very much a realistic novel of human behavior. There are no heroes or villains, just people fumbling around. I loved how the novel focuses on this one lifespan in which so much climate change will occur. She was born into one world and will die in another. Her industry paid its human masters handsomely but took wealth from the future. The only issue I had with the novel is that it really did not have a plot. But I loved the MC do much, I did not really care. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on August 1, 2023 by Katherine Herrera

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