Bonding

Electrifying, urgent and darkly funny, Mariel Franklin’s debut Bonding is a uniquely modern story of sex, tech and freedom in the messy tangle of our digital age.

Adrift in her early thirties, Mary is exhausted by an endless cycle of casual relationships and unstable work. When she loses her job, she books a spontaneous trip to Ibiza and meets Tom, a brilliant chemist on the verge of launching a new antidepressant: a drug called Eudaxa that claims to be able to cure the anxieties of modern life.

Back in London, Mary runs into the volatile and driven Lara, who has channelled her ambitions into Openr, an innovative dating app designed to revolutionize the industry. Mary and Lara have a complicated past, and as she begins working for Openr and falling for Tom, tech and pharma collide with shocking consequences, forcing Mary to question what love and success mean in a world that is hurtling out of control.