Published
in paperback by Acorn Independent Press - £8.99, and
as an eBook, priced £2.99
Can anyone’s life be reduced to an economic equation?
Saying
Goodbye to Verena is a bold new novel in which Ivy Turow
asks what decency means in our time. Fusing
economics and philosophical thought into fiction to explore the current
economic crisis, Ivy presents a unique take on the state of the world today.
Stella and Verena have been the closest of
friends since Cambridge. Outwardly
successful and expensively dressed, they regularly meet up for Caesar salads at
the Landmark Hotel. But this lunch is to be their last. In a cold, business-like tone, Stella
announces that the sum of her life is worth more in death than by staying alive
and assures Verena that by the end of the afternoon she will agree with her. Will you?
With a chillingly rational argument,
calling on thinkers from Foucault to Dawkins, moral theory to game theory, Stella
explains that there is no place for ethical individuals in the corporate machine.
The consequences of this uncompromising
logic are so stark that Stella genuinely believes she can’t live with them. However, Verena can actually benefit from her
untimely death and should thus support her decision. Is this utilitarian view
defensible?
A hybrid between fiction and non-fiction, Saying Goodbye to Verena has been
described as Bridget Jones meets Darren Aronofsky and Sophie’s World meets Veronika
Decides to Die. Unlike Sophie’s World, Saying Goodbye to Verena
aims not only to elucidate but also to provoke the multitude of decent people
in the world to take a stand for their values at this crucial point in history.
It warns that the present financial crisis
is only the tip of the iceberg of humanity’s problems that stem from a deep
moral decline. Recovering economically
will only be a short-term solution unless we can recover our integrity on a
collective scale.
Saying
Goodbye to Verena urgently calls for a wider
societal debate on our values. It is
sure to strike a chord with anyone who has been mistreated at work or struggled
to cope in the rat-race and will resonate with those who yearn for a greater
sense of decency in our time.
The
Author
Ivy Turow is an economist with a
postgraduate degree in philosophy. Saying Goodbye to Verena is her first
novel and was singled out from thousands of manuscripts by a literary agent who
believed in what Ivy had to say.
Ivy comments: “Everywhere I go I hear stories of people being treated cruelly at
work and I started to get obsessed with finding out why it occurs and why it is
so omnipresent. The simplicity of my conclusion astounded me: most of the time,
people do what they do simply because they can.
Think about that for a moment! Is this really where our society should
be at this point in our evolution? If
so, should we face up to it collectively and raise our children to be the most
effective predators they can be? Or should we try to do something about it? This is as fundamental a life question as we’re
ever going to face, and I thought it was time that someone addressed it in
normal words.”
Ivy Turow is a pseudonym.
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