Moderation

Sometimes people just...click.



'A highly charged, passionate and tender love story. Wonderful'

Kaliane Bradley, author of The Ministry of Time



'Castillo is a literary firecracker... If you liked Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, you'll like this'

Pandora Sykes, Books and Bits







Thirty-something Girlie Delmundo works a day job as a content moderator, flagging and removing the very worst that makes it on to the internet. She's one of the best at it, too - dispassionate, unflinching, maybe because she learned by necessity to wall off all her emotions when she was still a kid - so it's no surprise to anyone when the social-media company for which she works offers her a big salary rise and an office to start moderating its new venture: virtual-reality theme parks, lush and near-perfect simulations of civilizations long since dead.





Girlie takes the job, and getting paid to spend her days wandering the crowds of medieval jousts or exploring romantic Left Bank Paris seems too good to be true. Almost. Sure, she signed up for having to deal with the sordidness of pretty much any virtual space, but as she begins to explore the intricate worlds that she moderates, she notices two deeply troubling things: that there might be something much darker built into the very code of the company, and that William, technically her new boss, a man whose barriers are as mighty as her own, might just be that long-forgotten thing... Girlie's type.



Named one of '30 of the planet's most exciting young people' by the Financial Times, Elaine Castillo was born and raised in the Bay Area. Her debut novel America Is Not the Heart was named one of the best books of 2018 by NPR, San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Public Library, The New York Post, The Boston Globe, Real Simple, Lit Hub, and has been nominated for the Elle Award, the Center for Fiction Prize, the Aspen Words Prize, the Northern California Independent Booksellers Book Award, and the California Book Award.



Moderation is a novel that refuses to do things by halves. It is a piercing, laser-precise exploration of big tech... breathtakingly funny...and a highly charged, passionate and tender love story. A wonderful book.



Castillo is a literary firecracker... Reading her is like pressing your finger on a bruise just to feel the thrill. If you liked Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and/or The Circle by Dave Eggers, you'll like this



Tender and cutting, engrossing and immediate-Elaine Castillo's Moderation is a moving meditation on connection, growth, and how, in a world that's constantly on the verge of ending, one way we move forward is cultivating our own. Castillo's prose is luminous and lucid, balancing humor and emotion with wicked aplomb. Castillo expertly stretches the possibilities of language; Moderation is infinite.



With its unyielding density of sharply observed detail, high-resolution psychological drama, and driving narrative momentum, Moderation reminded me that the novel is still the best form of virtual reality we have



Phenomenal. A blisteringly funny critique of big tech, and an amazing love story too



Masterful...Castillo shifts seamlessly in scale and tone, from a wide-angled systems novel to a love story, and from barbed satire to staggering emotional depth. It's a triumph.



With this novel...Castillo raises the bar for writing about tech and virtual reality, family stories, and workplace romances...A brilliant novel with much to say about work, family, excess, identity, and love



Slyly brilliant... Castillo again proves to be an enviably erudite chronicler of (racist) history, power structures, identity politics, and socioeconomic inequities



Pick up the novel everyone will be talking about...Her new boss, William, also happens to be a total stud, and his presence transforms Castillo's flinty satire of the tech industry into a sultry romance novel



Biting... Castillo explores the wonders and limitations of technology while skewering its stewards' appetite for power



Elaine Castillo's wicked send-up of Silicon Valley skewers overlords and gatekeepers, probing schisms of race and class and daring us to salvage our humanity in a world where machines are on the march



A 'Pride and Prejudice' for the chronically online... Castillo's close third-person narration, and her unerring ear for social performance, make for a novel that is often baroquely funny, full of barbed observations that detonate like precision-guided bombs



Castillo is a writer of razor-sharp acuity who takes seriously the sinister instrumentalisation of storytelling, in a world increasingly veering right.