Kevin Nguyen's debut novel sits somewhere between literary fiction, workplace satire and technological thriller.

Set in New York's startup world, it begins after the sudden death of Lucas, a Vietnamese-American software engineer. His friend, unable to process the loss, impulsively steals the company's enormous archive of user data, setting off a story about surveillance, grief and the uneasy ethics of life online.

Nguyen makes digital infrastructure part of the novel's emotional architecture. Questions of privacy, race, friendship and identity emerge through recommendation algorithms, databases, startup culture and social media performance without ever becoming didactic. It's a novel interested less in technology itself than in how contemporary life becomes organised through it, and how grief changes shape inside networked worlds.

2022 One World paperback edition. Light shelf wear to wraps with a clean, bright interior and a firm binding.