"When financial wealth means physical size, everyone wants to get big. Watch out for the little people… A stunning read."
When financial wealth means physical size, everyone wants to get big. Watch out for the little people… A stunning read. A fascinating and complex novel of ideas that is also a fast and brutal gangland thriller. Like such master pieces as Nick Harkaway’s The Gone Away World or Jasper Fforde’s Shades of Grey, Jesse Andrews asks the reader to accept a world similar to ours, with one vital difference. In this case it is the fact that wealth equates with physical size; the more you have, the bigger you can grow. Those who live in poverty are barely the size of rats. Our slick narrator is a street kid trying to help his family. His story starts with the bold statements that his father was stepped on and his mother was crippled by a cat. With nothing but street smarts, muscles and badly thought-out plans, he and his sister try to make it into the big rich people’s society. It’s a heart-wrenching human story. Its also a vital social commentary. Some rich people are literally too big to see the poor. It is a frightening look at how blind western society can be. The language is both simple and complicated, a rhythm of fast-speech and truncated words that brings the slums and gangs vividly to life. Enjoyable and thought-provoking, surprising and disturbing, this book is really something special.
| Primary Genre | Modern and Contemporary Fiction |
In an alternate reality a lot like our world, every person's physical size is directly proportional to their wealth. The poorest of the poor are the size of rats, and billionaires are the size of skyscrapers. Warner and his sister Prayer are destitute - and tiny. Their size is not just demeaning but dangerous: day and night they face mortal dangers that bigger, richer people don't ever have to think about, from being mauled by cats to their house getting stepped on. There are no cars or phones built small enough for them, or schools or hospitals, for that matter - there's no point, when no one that little has any purchasing power, and when salaried doctors and teachers would never fit in buildings so small. Warner and Prayer know their only hope is to scale up, but how can two littlepoors survive in a world built against them? Brilliant, warm and funny, this is a social novel for our times in the tradition of 1984 or the work of Douglas Adams.
Munmun features in the following genres: Modern and Contemporary Fiction, General Fiction, Fiction
Munmun is available in Paperback, Hardback
Munmun was written by Jesse Andrews and published by Allen & Unwin
Munmun has 404 pages
£11.69
