The Pyramid of Needs

What do transgender identities, pyramid schemes and the climate crisis have in common? The answer is Ernest Price’s Pyramid of Needs. In his eclectic debut, Price introduces us to Linda, a 70-year-old woman who has spent most of her life in an alternative health pyramid scheme, and her adult son Jack, a transgender man who has been estranged from his parents for over a decade. The two are forced to come back into contact after Linda falls and breaks her hip, leaving her reliant on Jack.

Price alternates between the two opposing characters’ points of view, and we soon discover that they are two sides of the same cynical coin. Linda mistrusts all modern medicine, science and media, and must vet the world through the teachings of her ‘Supreme Self’ pyramid scheme, while Jack obsessively worries about climate change and relates everything back to the words of his therapist. Both so strong-willed, their collision is spectacular. I raced through this book, desperate to know how things could get better for these characters, and how they could get worse.

Through layers of irony, humour and cynicism, Price examines the complexities and ideological battles of the modern world – from technology to social media to science to humanity. At the forefront of the novel lies the question: what does it mean to be different from our parents? And even more significantly: what does it mean to become them?