BERLIN

In this dark and twisty debut, Setton crafts a clever thriller-cum–expat narrative for fans of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Antoine Wilson’s Mouth to Mouth, and Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station.

Daphne, a directionless 26-year-old Londoner, lands in Berlin with little plan for her time there. Living off her parents’ money, Daphne expects to make friends, find love, and discover her real life, the one she keeps expecting to appear and replace her bleak and circumscribed existence. A strange and violent event one night at her subleased flat leads to her gradual paranoid spiraling and the transformation of the city in her eyes. Berlin devolves from a hipster mecca into a nightmarish hellscape as Daphne struggles to hold on to her tenuous sanity. Setton’s sentences are the real draw here. She peppers Daphne’s speech with sharp observations about modern life, youth, and the burdens of contemporary womanhood. As Daphne's time in Berlin drags on, marked by her waning body mass and increased running mileage, she encounters many colorful characters, including internet dates, local Berliners, fellow expats, one ex-boyfriend, and a possible stalker. Daphne’s unreliability—her tendency to double back, correct the record, and manipulate the reader—creates a sense of disorientation that only enhances the slippery plot. Setton expertly portrays the wily, seductive nature of addictions and dysfunctions, and her novel's humorous voice belies horrors both small and large. While most of the book eschews thriller genre conventions, replacing usual plot beats with rumination and drifting (and the occasional footnote), the novel never lags. Daphne’s youthful despair and loneliness are horror stories in and of themselves—ones from which it is hard to look away, especially when coupled with the evocative German setting.

Raw thriller meets darkly funny coming-of-age for an enjoyable, unsettling debut.