A recent Australian novel about intimacy under the conditions of the internet.

The novel follows Ana, newly arrived in Melbourne, as she becomes entangled with Evan, a man whose former girlfriend’s online presence begins to exert its own strange pressure. What gets contorted in this space? Here in this book, a lot of it is love, friendship, longing; increasingly hard in a world where you're endlessly findable. Taylor is especially good on the comedy and grief of partial knowledge: the way we build people out of fragments, messages, profiles, search results, omissions. A clean, readable, quietly uneasy novel about wanting closeness while living inside the machinery of comparison. Very normal behaviour, obviously.

Allen & Unwin paperback, first edition, 2023. Very good condition with light shelfwear.