BOOKS
ANTHEM
Kids In America
RELEASED 17 MARCH 448 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook
▶ Author Noah Hawley
▶ Publisher Hodder & Stoughton
→ It’s a little more than a year since supporters of Donald Trump stormed the Capitol Building. Here was a direct challenge to American democracy. And yet, in its aftermath, a kind of guarded optimism arguably took hold. For moderates, the ascension of Joe Biden to the presidency appeared to hold out the promise of a return to politics conducted along more conventional lines.
Today, with Biden struggling to get legislation through the US Senate and Trump’s hold over the Republicans apparently secure, hope is less easy to find. How are we ever to explain what’s happening in the USA to our children? More widely, how are we to explain a world of “alternative facts”, deep inequalities and inaction over global heating? These are clearly questions that worry Fargo showrunner Noah Hawley, whose sixth novel grapples with our age of anxiety by melding elements of the contemporary literary thriller with an urban fantasy quest.