by Lydia Millet
First published 2025
A professor scrolls through an old friend's Instagram posts, unable to stop watching this digital window into a life that once intersected with his own. Across post-pandemic America, other characters navigate their own fixations and fears. A woman suspects her son-in-law watches disturbing videos featuring elderly people. A bodybuilder retreats into violent fantasies about women who reject him. Neighbors install cameras and track suspicious activity after finding crude messages in their mailbox. An academic faces accusations that threaten his career and reputation. A former marathon runner builds a small dwelling in his yard, determined to house refugees despite his family's concerns. These interconnected stories move between suburban lawns and college offices, big retail stores and assisted living centers, revealing how people cope with isolation and overwhelm. Millet captures the strange ways Americans connect and disconnect from each other when the world feels too much to handle.
Genres: fiction, american-fiction, contemporary, psychological-thriller, 21st-century, academic
Vibes: atmospheric, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: interconnected-stories, unreliable-narrator
Setting: America
Period: Post-Pandemic
256 pages · Hardcover · W. W. Norton & Company
Content warnings: anxiety, depression, mental-illness