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Butterfly Effects of Globalization
MERRY-GO-ROUND BROKE DOWN features nine connected stories that lead back to a high-stakes hostage crisis in a Manhattan hotel in 2008. Where did the idea for this novel come from?
We borrowed the structure from Arthur Schnitzler’s 1897 play La Ronde. In that play, the characters are connected through a chain of sexual relationships. In our book, the characters are connected through money.
Merry-Go-Round Broke Down explores the butterfly effects of globalization. The hostage crisis that brings the story together reflects both the darker side of globalization and its unintended consequences: in a tightly interconnected world, the same forces that create winners can also create losers.
What is it that draws you to the thriller genre?
We wanted to write a serious book that could also reach a wide audience. We thought the thriller genre—with its suspense and fast pace—would be the right vehicle for telling a complex story and the best way to bring the story of globalization to life.
Do you have a favorite scene in this thriller? One that was especially fun to craft?
My co-author and I have different favorites. Hers is the third chapter, about Simon, a British proprietary trader. Mine is the eighth chapter, about Arkady, the son of a Russian oligarch. Both stories are fast-paced and dramatic, with surprising endings.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
We are working on a few different projects, but no timetable yet.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
Fall 2008. The Waldorf Astoria New York. Two armed men storm the hotel’s famed bar and hold the occupants hostage: an American corporate raider, a Chinese tycoon, a British hedge fund manager, a Japanese housewife-turned-celebrity, a Mexican undocumented worker, a Wall Street bond salesman, and a Norwegian environmentalist.
Who are these terrorists? What do they want? And what ties them to their captives?
Merry-Go-Round Broke Down is a genre-breaking novel that explores globalization’s “butterfly effect”: how choices made in one corner of the world ignited an unstoppable chain of consequences that upended lives across continents.
MERRY-GO-ROUND BROKE DOWN: A NOVEL OF GREED, GUILT, AND GLOBALIZATION
Merry-Go-Round Broke Down, by authors David Woo and Margalit Shinar, is a multi-voice social thriller that uses one high-stakes frame, a hostage crisis in a Manhattan hotel bar in September 2008, to pull you through nine character stories that span continents and years. Each chapter drops into a different life, from a Chinese factory-town power broker facing the “sell or shut down” pressures of reform to an immigrant caught in the machinery of subprime mortgages, to a Wall Street salesman selling risky bonds with a straight face. The stories braid back toward that locked door in New York, where the gunmen fight to be seen and heard, even as the world looks away.
What struck me first is how the authors keep the book readable without sanding off the sharp edges. They don’t hide the ugliness. People say cruel things. They rationalize. They grab what they can. And yet the prose often stays concrete and physical, like the polished bull-and-bear centerpiece glinting under a chandelier right before everything goes sideways. I also liked the structure: each chapter feels like a self-contained novella with its own weather, its own pace, its own moral pressure. That gives the book momentum, and it also makes the argument feel earned.
The authorial choice that worked best for me is the refusal to make globalization an abstract villain. It shows up as a chain of handoffs. A mortgage gets “sold onward to some other idiot,” and a person’s life gets dragged with it. A town council in Norway weighs shiny civic dreams against risk, while a salesman performs confidence like it’s oxygen. Even the more cinematic moments land because they come with character texture, like Tomoko snapping from fear into action on a bus, doing something messy and brave and human. The didactic impulse sometimes peeks through, especially when a character’s inner monologue turns into a tidy thesis. But most of the time, the book earns its big ideas by putting them inside real choices, with real consequences.
Merry-Go-Round Broke Down is a contemporary fiction novel with the propulsion of a financial thriller. It’s fiction, but it wants to explain the world while it entertains you. I’d recommend it most to readers who like big-canvas, idea-driven novels and don’t mind sitting with moral discomfort, especially people interested in how the 2000s boom-and-bust era rippled across borders and into ordinary lives. If you want a story that makes you look up from the page and think, “Wait, is this how it really works?,” then it delivers.
Pages: 323 | ASIN : B0GFQ83FLL
