Growing up the pixelated glow of early-2000s chatrooms, teenage Meg feverishly explores her nascent fantasies of obliteration and submission with faceless strangers, testing the limits of her emerging desire. Ten years later, living in East London with her beloved circle of friends, she chases distraction and pleasure with equal intensity, reeling through the bars and clubs and occasionally looking for brutish men to dominate her in bed.

That’s when Daniel reappears. Daniel, the username that consumed Meg’s adolescence, forging her wants and needs before abruptly vanishing. Daniel, who now wants to meet in person.

A charged and capacious novel, This Is My Idea of Fun is at once a provocative account of teetering on the vertiginous edge of adulthood and a story of forging community while reconciling with the fact that those closest to us will inevitably experience us at our worst. With the lush sensuality of Melissa Broder, the irresistible intensity of Eliza Clark, and razor-sharp prose all their own, this debut announces Georgia Elander as a blistering, essential new voice.

Praise for This Is My Idea of Fun:

“An astonishing debut. Elander explores the complex intimacies of growing up online with an uncommon tenderness, taking big subjects prone to sensationalism—sex, violence, lying on the internet for fun—and, laying them out as small but meaningful acts of becoming in the world, makes them recognizable to us again. It is filthy, cruel, and loving, and I wanted to devour it.”—Huw Lemmy, author of Bad Gays: a Homosexual History

“A brilliant, rollicking journey of becoming, a night out in London that I didn’t want to end. Elander carries us through the discovery and danger in early internet chatrooms, the building, breaking, and rebuilding of narratives of desire, and the tenderness and sometimes-cruelty of beloved friendships. Here, the specificity and chaos of one early-twenties woman’s wanting, along with her insistence on her right to it, is treated with care, curiosity, and complete seriousness. Elander is a writer to watch.”—Eliana Ramage, author of To the Moon and Back

“A loving, sharply observed novel about desire, responsibility, and what we owe to each other. It made me blush on the train! Elander is a master of the pleasures of the specific, and the specifics of pleasure.”—Avery Curran, author of Spoiled Milk

“A completely gorgeous, sticky-floored portrait of desire, friendship and growing up on the Internet. I adored it.”—Hannah Beer, author of I Make My Own Fun