THERE ARE REASONS FOR THIS

This slim dystopian novel imagines a world of environmental collapse and the feel-good pharmaceuticals people use for coping.

In a climate-ravaged Denver—there's unrelenting heat, toxic rain, dust, and lightning storms that can kill—21-year-old Lucy spies through her apartment’s peephole on her neighbor, Helen. Helen comes and goes, as do the pretty girls she brings home. Two years ago, Lucy’s older brother, Mikey, escaped the stranglehold of their eastern Colorado home, promising Lucy that she could join him as soon as she was old enough. But he died mysteriously, and now, having finally made it to Denver, all Lucy has are memories of their daily phone conversations about his life as an artist and his friendship with Helen. Loneliness pervades this Denver: The population is in sharp decline, wild dogs roam the streets, robots staff the few restaurants still open. But loneliness creates new opportunities for humans. Helen is a professional cuddler, petting the foreheads of the rich; Lucy is a granddaughter for hire. Meanwhile, everyone takes the new federally approved drugs to escape existential dread; having failed to control the climate disaster, the state has opted for controlling the general mood. Nominally structuring her story as a mystery—what happened to Mikey?—author Berndt is really intent on exploring the possibility of love and longing when all else seems to be screeching to a halt. Imaginative and brooding, the novel toggles between Lucy’s childhood memories of her beautiful brother and Helen’s recollections of a troubled Mikey. Helen and Lucy tentatively move toward love, but Lucy has been keeping a secret—that she's Mikey’s sister—and its revelation may destroy everything.

Poignant and sexy; brilliantly captures the hushed nihilism of living on a dying planet.