Basket of Deplorables by Tom Rachman

Basket of Deplorables

Tom Rachman

This is a such a clever book. At first glance it's a collection of short stories but characters and plot lines from one story pop up in others. The book mixes observations about truth, communication and new technology into highly entertaining stories. Short stories are sometimes looked upon as too indirect or fragmentend. Not in this book. Try it and it might change you, even if it is only the way you think about short stories.

Extract
The biggest scandal in history was inevitable in retrospect. Hackers breached all the man email providers - Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, iCloud, everything - and downloaded each personal message ever archived, posting the whole lot online. For a while, the authorities battled to take it down. But the data dump kept appearing elsewhere. Log on to any of the mirrored sites, type in a name, and you could pore over the most intimate emails, be they from Bob Dylan or Kellyanne Conway or the Queen.
Parallels
  • Wag the Dog by Larry Beinhart
  • Black Mirror - TV series
  • Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace