Hey, everybody. How are you? Welcome to the program. This is the Other People Show. I'm Brad Listy. I am in Los Angeles. It's good to be with you. Thanks for tuning in. I hope you're doing okay. I have a great episode for you today. Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast.

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My guest today is Lydia Kiesling,

author of a new novel called Mobility.

I felt sort of guilty while writing the book because I think it is a reflection of like sort of the cynicism and like some of just the despair that, you know, I have felt in the last, you know, five years that I've been writing it and sort of seeing, you know, it's like a Trump era book, even if Trump is like not really mentioned that much in it.

But, and it's also a pandemic era book. And just seeing how like contentious and awful it was to try and just like make decisions about public health and the

public good and how all of those involved like so much kicking and screaming and fighting and

even you know fighting among people who like ostensibly agree about that like COVID is bad and

dangerous. I think yeah the book is really inflected by that. All right, that was Lydia

Keesling. Her new novel is called Mobility, available now from Crooked Media Reads. Mobility is about

a young girl named Bunny Glenn. We meet her at the beginning of the novel in Azerbaijan in the late 1990s.

She is an American there with her family. Her father is a foreign service officer and they are stationed in Baku.

This is after the Soviet Union has dissolved, the Cold War has ended, and there is underway a frenzied attempt to extract and capitalize on the

oil that exists under the Caspian Sea. Mobility then follows Bunny, from her adolescence in

Azerbaijan, to middle age, from Baku to Athens, Greece, to Houston, Texas, where she ends up working in the oil industry and things sort of come full circle.

And that's just a thumbnail.

This is an excellent novel that encompasses quite a lot, including the oil trade, or I guess they call it the energy space these days global capital class power politics

consumption desire all of these things but most importantly it's a totally engrossing story

it is deeply rooted in the personal it examines its larger themes through the life of its heroine,

Bunny Glenn, who is 100% human and relatable and a kind of perfect character through which

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