Like you have a choice (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798293264926)

Feeling well-adjusted? This book will fix that.

Welcome to Melbourne, a city where the coffee is single-origin and the existential dread is locally sourced. In this town of curated lifestyles and performative wellness, a band of charming misfits is doing their best to keep it weird.

There's Igor, who has discovered the only known cure for depression: mainlining the cringe of amateur slam poetry. There's Hector, a man whose biceps are less inflated than his ego, on a sacred quest for a gold pendant. And then there are the rest of them: the corporate zombies, the festival-loving nomads, and the spiritually bankrupt, all flailing beautifully in a sea of organic kombucha and poor life choices.

From a wellness spa that promises to "unsag everything" to a Cypriot restaurant where the bathrooms have seen more action than a UN peacekeeping force, "Like You Have a Choice" is a riotous tour of the places we go to escape ourselves. With a wit as sharp as a shard of artisanal sourdough, Ivan Niccolai lovingly dissects the anxieties and absurdities of our times.

Come for the laughs. Stay for the crushing realisation that you might be one of these people.

"Like You Have a Choice" is a collection of stories for anyone who has ever looked at the modern world and thought, "Are you kidding me?" Set in the artisanal hellscape of Melbourne, this book is a field guide to the beautifully broken, the profoundly confused, and the gloriously unhinged. Our tour guides include a menagerie of loveable degenerates: corporate drones who speak exclusively in buzzwords, wellness junkies seeking enlightenment through IV drips, and exiles who can't remember which country they're supposed to be nostalgic for.

At the centre of this circus is the "abomination," a recurring figure who suspects they might be a human-shaped collection of borrowed mannerisms and a vague sense of dread. Follow these characters as they embark on deeply misguided quests for meaning. Witness Igor, a Russian connoisseur of other people's bad poetry, who gets his kicks from the suffering of slam poets. Meet Hector, a Greek god whose primary life goal is to find a necklace that adequately conveys his sexual availability. The journey detours through a high-end sex club for the emotionally bankrupt, a Zambian missionary compound run by stoned teenagers, and a version of inner-city Melbourne that has been bulldozed and rebuilt by a mysterious Angolan architect with a multi-billion-dollar grudge and a penchant for brutalism.

Like You Have a Choice is a hilarious and horrifying deep-dive into the absurdity of trying to be a person in a world that's politely taken leave of its senses.