Told entirely through the transcript of a five-person group chat over eighteen months, this small-press debut novel risks a lot on formal conceit alone, and for the first thirty pages, the risk feels shakier than the rest of the book eventually earns.
Once the five voices settle into distinct, recognisable rhythms — typing habits, inside jokes, the specific way each character deploys or withholds punctuation — the format stops feeling like a gimmick and starts doing real narrative work, particularly in how it handles a slow-building rift between two characters that plays out almost entirely in what goes unsaid between messages.
“The format could have been a stunt. Instead it's the only way this particular story could be told.”
The novel's weakest stretch comes roughly two-thirds through, when a plot development forces several characters to communicate outside the chat, and the book has to awkwardly summarise those conversations secondhand, breaking the immersive rule it had otherwise held to strictly.
Where the book succeeds most is in its handling of time — long gaps between messages, sometimes weeks, are rendered with nothing but a timestamp, and the accumulated white space does more to convey the drift of a long friendship than pages of conventional narration likely could have.
It's a genuinely small book, under two hundred pages, from a press most readers won't have heard of, and it's worth seeking out specifically for how confidently it commits to a structure that could easily have collapsed into a novelty.
