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Mobility: A Novel

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National Bestseller Longlisted for the 2024 Joyce Carol Oates Prize One of Powell’s Best Books of 2023 One of TIME’s Best Books of 2023 One of Vulture’s Best Books 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 ‏ : ‎ Zando – Crooked Media Reads (September 24, 2024)


Language ‏ : ‎ English


Paperback ‏ : ‎ 368 pages


ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1638931631


ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 38


Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12 ounces


Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1.1 x 8.2 inches


Best Sellers Rank: #450,650 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #4,873 in Coming of Age Fiction (Books) #7,894 in Women's Domestic Life Fiction #24,311 in Literary Fiction (Books)


#4,873 in Coming of Age Fiction (Books):


#7,894 in Women's Domestic Life Fiction:


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Top Amazon Reviews

    • Wonderful book.
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
    • A life tied to the oil industry
*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
    • I had to read the epilogue to figure out what this book was about
Reading this book, I couldn’t figure out if it was about this woman who seemed emotionally vacant, the history of the oil industry, or that anyone who worked for the oil industry was immoral. In the epilogue, she told me it was about climate change.
Reviewed in the United States on February 3, 2024 by Amazon Customer
    • Another excellent novel from Lydia Kiesling
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 woman's journey through global energy geopolitics
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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