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A story of boy meets girl meets AI therapist, Sike explores our aching pursuit of love and self-control.
Adrian earns his living writing lyrics for rappers he never meets, and finds success with a hit song about his own fruitless search for love. After his last relationship ends in a spiral of angst, Adrian decides it's time to try Sike: the new lauded and elite AI psychotherapy app that tracks your every move and emotion, and guides you toward mental contentment.
He soon falls for Maquie, a smart and pragmatic venture capitalist scouring London's tech scene for the next business boom. She can see no potential investments though, nothing sparkles. She wants to find a business as successful as Sike, and yet she is also one of the holdouts who refuse to use it.
Shifting between Adrian and Maquie's perspectives as it tracks the fraught first year of their relationship, Sike is a story of two people wrestling with connection, identity, anxiety, success, and the limits of our obsession with self-analysis and awareness.
For fans of Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun and the modern love stories of Sally Rooney, Fred Lunzer's debut novel brings us an incisive and intimate deep dive into the reach for clarity by a curious and ambitious, anxious and irresolute generation.
"Lunzer debuts with a clever if uneven tale of AI, love, and hip-hop. Adrian, a white 20-something Jewish man from North London, ghostwrites lyrics for popular rappers...Pop culture aficionados ought to take note." —Publishers Weekly
"Lunzer is eager to demonstrate his awareness of the thorny issues his book raises, and initially succeeds with clever, self-assured prose...delightful phrasing and figurative language... A smart, elaborate, and discursive modern romance." ―Kirkus Reviews
This information about Sike was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Fred Lunzer is a writer coming out of the tech world, where he works in AI research and strategy. He has British and German citizenship, grew up in London and Tokyo, and speaks Japanese. He is the third of five children, and his family is made up of writers, musicians, jewelers and filmmakers. He lives in London. Sike is his debut novel.
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