The Cave Dwellers

Written by Christina McDowell

Narrated by Madeleine Maby

This “delicious take on the one percent in our nation’s capital” (Town & Country) and clever combination of The Bonfire of the Vanities and The Nest explores what Washington, DC’s high society members do behind the closed doors of their stately homes.

They are the families considered worthy of a listing in the exclusive Green Book—a discriminative diary created by the niece of Edith Roosevelt’s social secretary. Their aristocratic bloodlines are woven into the very fabric of Washington—generation after generation. Their old money and manner lurk through the cobblestone streets of Georgetown, Kalorama, and Capitol Hill. They only socialize within their inner circle, turning a blind eye to those who come and go on the political merry-go-round. These parents and their children live in gilded existences of power and privilege.

But what they have failed to understand is that the world is changing. And when the family of one of their own is held hostage and brutally murdered, everything about their legacy is called into question in this unputdownable novel that “combines social satire with moral outrage to offer a masterfully crafted, absorbing read that can simply entertain on one level and provoke reasoned discourse on another” (Booklist, starred review).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
• Release date: May 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9781797113586

Christina McDowell

Christina McDowell is the author of the critically acclaimed book, After Perfect: A Daughter’s Memoir, as well as the author of Cave Dwellers. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post; The New York Times; Los Angeles Times; HuffPost; The Guardian; O, The Oprah Magazine; People; LA Weekly; Marie Claire; USA TODAY; and The Village Voice, among others. Born and raised in Washington, DC, Christina is an advocate for restorative justice and criminal justice reform. She lives in Washington, DC.

Reviews for The Cave Dwellers

[Margaret Deskin · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Overprivileged teens are pressured by social media to hate their whiteness and their wealthy parents. Wish I had known before I started the book that the author had issues because of her own father’s criminal conviction and loss of money — this explains why each father in the book was either a criminal or otherwise cruel sleaze-ball and one of her central characters hated her own father who was in prison. There was not a single mother in the book with redeeming qualities, either.

Nobody needs a work of fiction whose central theme is that white Americans should resent and apologize for what we are born as. No other countries go through this self-flagellation. The author needs a shrink. While her prose is good and interesting, it seemed to have built up to . . . nothing really happening. Waste of my time, in retrospect.