Why we liked it - It evokes the 90s art scene really well. The trendy bars in derelict buildings, the pretentiousness, the aspirational excitement, the drugs, the music. Hari Kunzru is very good at evoking the time and place. Although on the face of it, it is a covid novel, he managed the space well and it didn't feel confined by the pandemic.

Once, Jay was an artist. Shortly after graduating from his London art school, he was tipped for greatness, a promising career already taking shape before him.

Now, undocumented in the United States, he lives out of his car and makes a living as an essential worker, delivering groceries in a wealthy area of upstate New York. The pandemic is still at its height--the greater public panicked in quarantine--and though he has returned to work, Jay hasn't recovered from the effects of a recent Covid case. When Jay arrives at a house set in an enormous acreage of woodland, he finds the last person he ever expected to see again: Alice, a former lover from his art school days.

Their relationship was tumultuous and destructive, ultimately ending when she ghosted him and left for America with his best friend and fellow artist, Rob. In the twenty years since, their fortunes could not be more different: as Jay teeters on the edge of collapse, Alice and Rob have found prosperity in a life surrounded by beauty. Ashamed, Jay hopes she won't recognize him behind his dirty surgical mask; when she does, she invites him to recover on the property--where an erratic gallery owner and his girlfriend are isolating as well--setting a reckoning decades in the making into motion.