A dazzling satire of family and technology in the twenty-first century from Man Booker Prize-winner DBC Pierre

From the Man Booker Prize-winning author of Vernon God Little comes a humane, deeply empathetic starburst of a satire; the most moving and entertaining exaggeration of the fearful nightmare of trying to raise a kid now. 

It’s a big bad world out there in twenty-first century Dopamine City. Modern life has taken its toll on all Lonnie held dear. It took his young wife, then his job in the sewers. Now it has come for his children. Shelby-Ann – the maddening apple of Lonnie’s eye; his little girl – wants her first smartphone. 

New realities are rocketing their way to 37 Palisade Row, where everything will change daily and at breakneck speed. Lonnie finds himself in a stitch: he must join this new world or wither in it. Unless he can mastermind a vanishing act … 

Meanwhile in Dopamine City is the story of a father, a daughter and a devious device. It’s a speedball, starburst satire; a freewheeling work of the human imagination. And it’s about love and loss: a riotous cry for soul and flesh and heart in the cooling bathwater of our automatic times. 

DBC Pierre’s long-awaited new novel Meanwhile in Dopamine City will be published on 6th August 2020 in the UK.

‘If writers were athletes, DBC Pierre would be hanging out with the skydivers … Pierre’s high-risk prose explores and expands the cartoonish, taboo­-busting outer edges of literary possibility.’ Independent

DBC Pierre is the author of Ludmila’s Broken English, Lights Out in Wonderland and Vernon God Little, which won the Man Booker Prize, the Whitbread Prize for Best First Novel, the Bollinger Wodehouse Everyman Award and the James Joyce Award.