Jonathan Cape / Penguin Random House, 2023. Two blank pages ripped out at back, otherwise good secondhand condition.

Seamus, Fyodor, Ivan, Noah and Fatima are running out of time to decide on their futures.

In a university town in the American Midwest, this circle of lovers and friends ask themselves: what is the right thing to stake a life on? Work, love, money, dance, poetry? Is love possible without harm? And what does true connection look like in an age of precarity?

The author of the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Real Life returns with a deeply involving new novel of young men and women trying to work out what they want, and who they are.