Viking explores 'age of anxiety' in second novel from Luiza Sauma

Viking is publishing a new novel about the modern condition and "our age of anxiety" from Luiza Sauma, whose debut novel, Flesh and Bone and Water, came out with the same publisher last year.

Mary Mount acquired world rights in Everything You Ever Wanted from Emma Paterson (formerly of RCW, now of Aitken Alexander) to publish as a lead fiction title in June 2019.

Commenting, Mount said Sauma’s novel "gets to the heart of so much that is new about our modern condition: the overbearing nature of life online; the desire for fulfilment in a world where jobs seem to be more about presentation than content; the disconnect between the real present and the lives being lived on screen". She added however what is "so moving" about it is "the way it reminds us how much of our life is not like that at all. It is also incredibly funny and wildly imagined".

The book's blurb talks about some of the mundanities of modern life: "You wake up, you go to work. You don’t go outside for twelve hours at a time. You have strategy meetings about how to use hashtags. After work you order expensive drink after expensive drink until you’re so blackout drunk you can’t remember the circumstances which have led you to waking up in bed with your colleague. The next day you stay in bed until the afternoon, scrolling through your social media feeds and wondering why everyone else seems to be achieving so much. Sometimes you don’t get out of bed at all."

But 100 lucky winners have the opportunity to escape it all and start a new life on Nyx, another planet "without Instagram and online dating". The only caveat is if you go, you can never come back; but what on Earth could there possibly be to miss?

Sauma, born in Rio de Janeiro and raised in London, worked at the Independent on Sunday for several years before becoming a novelist and has an MA in Creative & Life Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London, where she was awarded the Pat Kavanagh Award.