First published 2022
A young woman has built her life around what she calls "the portal." Her viral posts have made her internet famous, and she travels the world meeting adoring fans. She spends her days scrolling through endless feeds, absorbing the strange new language and customs of digital life. Climate change accelerates around her. Economic uncertainty spreads. An unnamed dictator rises to power. An epidemic of loneliness takes hold. Still the images and references pile up, creating a landscape that exists beyond sense and irony. Portal dwellers ask themselves: "Are we in hell? Will we keep doing this until we die?" Then two messages from her mother break through the digital noise: "Something is wrong" and "How soon can you get here?" Real life crashes into the portal's growing absurdity. The protagonist faces a world that seems to contain overwhelming evidence for both human goodness and its opposite. She must navigate between infinite scrolling and genuine connection, between the virtual relationships that have defined her and the family crisis demanding her presence.
Genres: dystopia, literary-fiction, contemporary, 21st-century
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, social-media-influencer
Setting: Africa, Russia
Period: 21st-century
168 pages · Hardcover · Mondadori
Content warnings: anxiety, depression, mental-illness