The Echo Chamber, John Boyne

From the author of The Heart's Invisible Furies and powered with the Boyne's characteristic humor and razor-sharp observation, The Echo Chamber is a satiric helter skelter, a dizzying downward spiral of action and consequence, poised somewhere between farce, absurdity, and oblivion What a thing of wonder a mobile phone is. Six ounces of metal, glass, and plastic, fashioned into a sleek, shiny, precious object. At once, a gateway to other worlds—and a treacherous weapon in the hands of the unwary, the unwitting, the inept. The Cleverley family live a gilded life, little realizing how precarious their privilege is, just one tweet away from disaster. George, the patriarch, is a stalwart of television interviewing, a 'national treasure' (his words), his wife Beverley, a celebrated novelist (although not as celebrated as she would like), and their children, Nelson, Elizabeth, Achilles, various degrees of catastrophe waiting to happen. Together they will go on a journey of discovery through the Hogarthian jungle of the modern living where past presumptions count for nothing and carefully curated reputations can be destroyed in an instant. Along the way they will learn how volatile, how outraged, how unforgiving the world can be when you step from the proscribed path. To err is maybe to be human but to really foul things up you only need a phone.