The Last Summer We Touched Each Other: Alone Together in the Age of the Screen (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798189181528)

Mara is a heart surgeon who holds strangers' lives in her hands and has no one to hold her own. Camila is followed by a hundred thousand people and known by none of them. Leo hasn't been touched by another human being in fourteen months, and the forum in his pocket has an explanation for his pain. Tomás has fallen in love with a woman who lives inside his phone and doesn't exist. Sofía has a thousand options and an empty apartment. Daniel makes strangers weep at the piano and has become invisible to the one algorithm that decides who is worth wanting.

Six lives. Six lonelinesses hidden behind a thousand connections. None of them knows the others-until the hottest night of the year, when the overloaded grid finally gives out, and at fourteen minutes past nine every screen in the city goes dark at once.

And in the sudden blackness, four million people lift their heads and meet the world again. Strangers reach for one another's hands. A concert becomes a choir. A boy on the edge of something terrible feels a girl's fingers close around his. And in a single night without screens, a city remembers the oldest thing human beings know how to do.

The Last Summer We Touched Each Other is a luminous, deeply human novel about the loneliness no one talks about-the kind you can feel surrounded by thousands-and about the small, unfilmable, irreplaceable moments that pull us back to each other. Grounded in what science is only beginning to say about isolation in the digital age, it asks the question beating quietly beneath all our screens:

For readers of Beautiful World, Where Are You, A Little Life, and The Midnight Library-a story about connection, choice, and what it costs to touch another person for real.