Oval

DEBUT In near-future Berlin, Anja and Louis live on the Berg, a human-made mountain and sustainable ecocommunity that has never worked as it should. Part of a creative class in which innovation and corporate doublespeak reign supreme, artists are patronized (in multiple senses of the word) as consultants, and everything can be commodified. The couple struggle to find normalcy after the death of Louis's mother, and Anja soon realizes that Louis is hiding more than his grief when he reveals Oval, a pill he's invented that makes people more generous. He plans to circulate Oval in the city's thriving club scene as a way of subverting neoliberal charity and improving income disparity. Featuring a vaguely sinister, all-reaching monopolist company; biotechnologies such as Oval; and Berg homes that are inherently destructive, Wilk's debut reads as a prelude to postapocalyptic biotech ecofiction, recalling Jeff VanderMeer's Borne. Weighted with Anja's angst about her relationship with Louis, whom we only see through her eyes, the story is slow to build, peaking in the final pages.