Kismet: A Novel

by Luke Tredget Narrated by Ellie Heydon

Overview

Black Mirror meets Bridget Jones in this whip-smart debut set in a world where the ultimate matchmaking app has redefined romance.

Twenty-nine-year-old Anna is smart, vivacious, and in the midst of a complete existential meltdown. Sure, from the outside everything in her life seems to be going just fine: She has a decent job, a devoted BFF, and a lovely boyfriend named Pete with whom she is exactly 70% compatible, according to Kismet, the matchmaking app that everyone in Anna's world uses to find love.

Still . . . isn't there supposed to be more to life than this? Should she settle for a secure and predictable existence with Pete, or risk everything for a life of passion and adventure?

With true adulthood (the dreaded thirty) just weeks away, Anna secretly re-joins Kismet, and soon encounters Geoff, a dashing, forty-something journalist with whom she has a shockingly high compatibility score of 81. How can she not at least see where this goes . . . ? A funny and propulsive love story for our over-networked age, Kismet challenges us to take stock of how technology shapes our desires and what it means to "settle."

Editorial Reviews

OCTOBER 2018 - AudioFile

Narrator Ellie Heydon’s voice delivers the apathy and anxiety of a young woman who is suffering an existential crisis. Tredget’s novel examines the high toll that social media and other forms of technology take on our personal lives. Just before her thirtieth birthday, Anna can’t help wondering if there’s more to romance than her current boyfriend, Pete, with whom she’s comfortable—but maybe not perfectly compatible. So she enrolls in a dating app. Soon enough, she begins to question whether or not the compatibility numbers really matter when it comes to true connection. But the damage may have already been done. Heydon gives listeners a solid performance, bringing Anna’s relationship insecurities to life in sharp contrast to the ordinary lives of those around her. A.L. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

06/25/2018
Tredget’s trenchant, entertaining debut traces how big data and social media have become an obstacle for healthy relationships. Anna, a Londoner on the cusp of turning 30, nets her first major writing project for her job at a quasi-journalistic publication that blends sponsoring companies’ brand values with reporting. Feeling left behind by her friends’ trappings of adulthood and vaguely dissatisfied with her long-term partner, Pete, Anna signs up for Kismet, a dating service that harvests users’ online activity to rate matches. Immediately following a badly bungled interview, Anna meets exceptionally handsome 40-something Geoff. Though Anna and the stable, predictable Pete rate a 70 compatibility score, the more adversarial, spontaneous Geoff hits an improbably high 81. He reminds Anna of her deceased father, a chance for Tredget to perhaps too easily overinvest many of Anna’s inadequacies, missteps, and hidden desires in her bereavement. Geoff encourages her to return to her bygone creative projects, including using Instagram to solicit help in reuniting an abandoned suitcase to its owner. As Anna hesitantly embarks on an affair with Geoff, Tredget carefully maps how their compatibility score fosters a psychological disintegration that alienates everyone else in her life. Tredget’s solid satire provides an incisive view of the uncertainties of contemporary adulthood. Agent: Georgia Garrett, Rogers, Coleridge and White. (Aug.)

From the Publisher

"The ennui of the modern-day privileged class has rarely been captured as poignantly as in Luke Tredget's Kismet, a deeply felt reflection of the ways in which technology that was supposed to bring people closer together often only serves to isolate them (and occasionally drive them mad). And as Tredget's complicated, often frustrating, but eminently relatable protagonist shows, the truest human connection occurs when we put our phones away."—DoreeShafrir, author of Startup

"Tredget writes a funny, timely story, with flawed and relatable characters, about how technology affects our desires and what it means to 'settle.' Though he satirizes modern dating and the idea of perfection in a relationship, he writes with an engaging warmth and lightness. Readers will surely enjoy this witty modern love story."—Booklist

"A sharply written and heartfelt story about the connections between us, technological or otherwise. Luke Tredget has created a protagonist so lovable that you won't be able to stop reading until you know her fate."—LeslieCohen, author of This Love Story WillSelf-Destruct

"Sharp, witty and full of tension...an intelligent and highly readable novel."—IrishTimes

"Tredget's trenchant, entertaining debut traces how big data and social media have become an obstacle for healthy relationships...An incisive view of the uncertainties of contemporary adulthood."—Publishers Weekly

"Kismet is compelling for more than its unflinching study of the infiltration of romance by technology and algorithms. At its heart this novel is about what endures in spite of all that; a modern love story of exceptional warmth, intelligence and humanity."—Luke Kennard, author of The Transition

it "[a] perceptive debut novel...[a] fast-moving and witty love story for the digital age."—Shelf-Awareness

Kirkus Reviews

2018-05-15
In this age of data insecurity, the premise of Tredget's first novel is highly topical.A dating app called Kismet identifies ideal matches, on a scale of one to 100, based on the internet profiles people build up through online activity. Since users can't easily manipulate their profiles, Kismet scores can't be inflated. So when Anna, already cohabiting with Pete—ranked 70 for her—has a chance meeting with her highest score to date, Geoff, an 81, what's an almost-engaged, on-the-cusp-of-turning-30, beleaguered magazine writer to do? Once this intriguing hook is cast, the novel's execution slackens. The main driver of suspense is the question of whom Anna ends up with. On the way to a conclusion that, to the author's credit, is far from foregone, there are many segments whose sole functions seem to be expanding material that could have been dispatched in a novella to 400 pages. Anna's extended birthday celebration is a case in point: At a pub session followed by a dinner party, Anna and her friends relate rambling and none-too-scintillating anecdotes almost in real time. Her character is assembled like a recipe: Mix two parts creative inventiveness with one part recently diagnosed depression and a dash of recent bereavement, then bake in a convection oven swirling with premature midlife dread. Still, Anna's crises are refreshingly non-gender specific. She intends to control her own destiny irrespective of whom she's paired with and takes the blame for her own bad decisions. In one scene that readers burned out with angst-ridden heroines like the one in the New Yorker story "Cat Person" will appreciate, she gets herself into a potentially compromising position with a date and then decides not to sleep with him because "she just doesn't want to." Tredget is obviously in tune with the travesties wrought, and ethical quandaries posed, by corporate-controlled media: His protagonist's work debacles amply illustrate the increasingly blurred lines between journalism and advertising.Despite some missteps, a thought-provoking debut.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940173577665
Publisher:	Hachette Audio
Publication date:	08/07/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

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