Hillbilly Elegy A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis | J.D. Vance

'THE POLITICAL BOOK OF THE YEAR' Sunday Times 'You will not read a more important book about America this year' Economist 'The best book about the alienation within America' Evening Standard 'The memoir gripping America... Vividly articulates the despair and disillusionment of blue-collar America' Sunday Times.

They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild (the author) would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that this is only the short, superficial version. Vance's grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother, struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. Vance piercingly shows how he himself still carries around the demons of their chaotic family history. A deeply moving memoir with its share of humour and vividly colourful figures, 'Hillbilly Elegy' is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.