This month's book is The Ten Percent Thief by Lavanya Lakshminarayan.

This book throws the reader right into a series of vignettes from perspectives reaching from the bottom of the social ladder to those desperate to stay in the good graces of the top. Corporate interests and worker productivity decide who gets to stay and who is deported to live on the dreaded analog fringes. If capitalism’s got you down, read on!

From the publisher’s website:

Welcome to Apex City, formerly Bangalore, where everything is decided by the mathematically perfect Bell Curve.

With the right image, values and opinions, you can ascend to the glittering heights of the Twenty Percent – the Virtual elite – and have the world at your feet. Otherwise you risk falling to the precarious Ten Percent, and deportation to the ranks of the Analogs, with no access to electricity, running water or even humanity.

The system has no flaws. Until the elusive “Ten Percent Thief” steals a single jacaranda seed from the Virtual city and plants a revolution in the barren soil of the Analog world.

Content warnings: confinement, deportation, body shaming, bullying, child abuse, violence, death, abortion, infertility.

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