Roundabout

Description

A group of friends and lovers in Paris weather the polycrisis of contemporary life together and explore cycles of connecting, belonging, departing, and inevitable change in Will Mountain Cox's debut novel.

Excerpt:

In the spring, the Seine promptly flooded its promenades with water. Yellow was the water, and murky too. It matched the spring sky of election season and some of us spoke in documentary voices. One evening we crossed the river on our way to an election party. From the bridge we looked down in.There were no answers in the river. It was just pretty in its drawn-out, yellow-tough question. At the party, Brassens was playing. His music was starting to mean something new. The party had no television, but it had a view onto a tall new-build building with rows and rows of windows. We listened to the election on the radio, pausing Brassens to listen, some of us watching the living rooms of the building we could see into. There were dozens of living rooms, each with their own television making colors. When the results burst in we watched the living rooms begin churning. Hands were thrown toward the sky, toward God we guessed. And remote controls were thrown screenward, useless.The apartments with nice decorations looked angry. So too the apartments with no decor at all.