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Raw, intense, uncompromising, what a debut! The narrator is a young (30-ish) British woman of nonwhite heritage caught in a love triangle with “the man I want to be with�� and his other on-and-off girlfriend, “the woman I am obsessed with�� (well, it’s a quadrangle, he is married). They are privileged, she is not. They are white, she is not. They have fans (he in the art industry, his other girlfriend as a savy influencer on Instagram), she doesn’t. So she becomes their fan-turned-stalker.

She is entangled in a cat-and-mouse relationship with him, no actual love on either side, but the game of domination between the sexes. She descends into an obsessive goal to own him, to control him, to reverse the arrow of dominance, but the pursuit of which just shows how much she lets that control her life.

At the same time, she follows his other girlfriend on Instagram, practically turning into a virtual stalker, trying to connect the dots of his and her life during the weeks and months when he avoids her, but also envying the other girlfriend's white privileged life of a famous poet’s daughter and a trend-setter of an expensive and “curated�� lifestyle that brings her an army of Instagram followers and fans.

Their story is told in a nonlinear way through shorter vignettes that alternate between the narrator’s story and her thoughts (evidently, lending voice to the author) about the hypocrisies, illusions, and injustices of our contemporary society. Some vignettes read like short essays, most of which are quite powerful like “There’s no business like��, “buds��, “how does your garden grow��, and others.

Patel’s uncompromising and powerful views extend to the unequal class, racial, and gender issues of our times, as well as the optical illusions of social media which slowly penetrate into our lives.

It’s very quotable on all these issues (the lower the level of melanin in the body, the higher your place in the hierarchy ��), so I’ll just sample a few about social media...

and its dehumanizing and illusory nature:
this automated time where an algorithm has to get to know you before a human being can […] You hear people you don’t know, in living rooms you’ll never be invited into, preparing meals you’ll never eat.

and its role in perpetuating the inequalities:
Aren’t these wealthy aesthetes on Instagram merely another iteration of a class elite deciding what is good and what is not good, shaping our reality the way they always have just better disguised by technology which has the optics of transparency and democracy?

and this scary aspect:
I’ve never followed anyone before and I’m surprised at how easy it is and how engrossed people are in their lives that they don’t notice someone tracking them.

My only caveats are about some repetitions that the author could have done without and the ending (view spoiler)[or rather the lack of it (hide spoiler)] - still can’t make up my mind if it’s a literary ingenuity or a new writer’s struggle with how to go about it. These personal caveats aside, this is a terrific debut and an author to watch.