None of us will live to find out the answer to that question unless you just so happen to have the keys to immortality or time travel. Eliminate negativity and change your life with best-selling author, happiness expert and life coach Domonique Bertolucci. Not one main character in this book, with all of his/her "superior" education, could communicate effectively or at least like an adult, which was the most annoying character flaw for me. When the novel opens, Sylvie has learned that a child Scott coached on the wrestling team has died, and the suspected cause is hazing.

If everyone in the family would just TALK to each other, there wouldn't be a problem but the last thing these people can do is communicate. It's a fairly common dystopian quality that the author will depict a future that is somewhat based in our reality, to make the events seem more shocking and harrowing for the reader, but often the dramatic nature of the additional dystopian "elements" often makes this new world easy to separate from our own.Filled with sharp observations about the way in which we live now, Everything You Ever Wanted is both an acute satire of our social media-dominated times – notably, Iris still strives for “likes” when living on Nyx, even though she has no idea whether anyone on Earth is reading her sanitised social media posts – and a haunting examination of depression and anxiety rendered in diamond-sharp prose with barely a wasted word.

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. Random House presents the audiobook edition of Ikigai by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles, read by Noako Mori. Summarily, Tiggy is one of the most unbearably annoying, privileged cows to wallow in the pond of self pity I have ever met in fiction: and all the better for it.The problem with millennials like myself making jokes like this one, however, dilutes the genuine issues of late-stage capitalism, the rise of depression and suicide amongst young people, and the gradual heating of the entire planet.

I really enjoyed reading Scarlett's sections: her observations are cynical and perceptive, her voice convincing, her quips sharp and her cynical humour very funny. Her situation is one that I'm sure many of us are fairly familiar with; she feels her life in the modern world is hopeless, ungratifying, and she craves some kind of deeper satisfaction from her actions. For Iris and her fellow volunteers are also part of a Truman Show reality TV experiment, Life on Nyx, which will see their daily lives and thoughts beamed back to Earth, even though they have no contact with the world back home, no internet or social media, no television, no way of knowing what’s actually going on out there – and, worst of all, no way back. The scenery of Iris' Earth is completely identical to the Earth of our own, having visited London often as a child I actually found it rather nostalgic. For Arthur Dent, who has only just had his house demolished that morning, this seems already to be more than he can cope with.It’s not a terrible life; she works, goes to the pub with her colleagues, has lunch with her family and chats with her university best friend and current housemate Kiran but there’s always a dark shadow in her mind threatening to cloud over her at any time. Scarlett is as far from Sloaney origins of Tiggy as possible: out of a council estate, away from a mother who hardly provided any mothering, she's confident, cynical, utterly selfish and she has, as I mentioned before, a grand plan she's working towards. I found the fact that no one in Sylvie's family ever really communicated honestly with each other led to bad decisions, or worse, no decisions at all.

Sir Michael Caine knows a thing or two about gangs: whether that’s joining one as a kid, or playing them in movies for over 50 years. This choice of narrative style was quite interesting and unique I found, as it's not completely passive but it does hinder the authenticity of the connection we can make with Iris' character. Rather than grand, epic, sweeping futurism, we have here an intimate tale of one woman’s yearning for both an escape from the drudgery of our cyclical life (work, home, sleep, work) and a way to feel like she was part of something important, both personally and professionally. In this story it's almost like these characters are significant to the themes because they are so insignificant. The reader is present with all these bright and shiny appealing things that makes Nyx seem like such a beautiful place, better than Earth by miles, but as time passes in the book the reality is carefully and painfully revealed through inconveniences such as the sunlight.Starting reading this book on holiday, as I really like the author so thought I’m sure I’ll like this one. She even begins to crave the very things she despised so much on Earth, such as social media and starts to see all the positive attributes of things she previously labelled as bland and void of meaning.