A Better Life

‘Shriver remains a formidably sharp writer, one of the best we have’ EVENING STANDARD

In a provocative novel addressing contemporary immigration by the sharply observant Lionel Shriver, a New York family takes in a Honduran migrant – who may or may not be the innocent paragon she claims to be.

Gloria Bonaventura, a divorced mother of three living with her 26-year-old son Nico in a sprawling house in Brooklyn, decides to participate in a new city programme – Big Apple, Big Heart – that would pay her to take in a migrant as a boarder. Liberal to the extreme, Gloria is thrilled when sweet, kind, helpful Martine arrives. But Nico is sceptical. A classic live-at-home, unemployed Gen Zer with no interest in adulthood, Nico resents the interruption which sees him suffer the indignity of moving out of the self-contained basement flat, and back into his childhood bedroom.

As the months go by, Martine endears herself to both Nico's sisters, while finding her way into Gloria's heart and even, briefly, Nico's. But as Martine's disturbingly dodgy compatriots begin to show up, Nico becomes hostile to both his mother's altruism and the ‘migrant crisis’ in general – and turns out to be anything but a reliable narrator himself.

Based loosely on a programme New York City Mayor Eric Adams floated but did not initiate, A Better Life is Lionel Shriver at her best: smart, funny, and sensitive to the moral nuances of perhaps the most divisive issue of our times.