Sike: A Novel

by Fred Lunzer

Overview

A story of boy meets girl meets AI therapist, Sike explores our aching pursuit of love and self-control

Adrian earns his living writing lyrics for rappers he never meets, and finds success with a hit song about his own fruitless search for love. After his last relationship ends in a spiral of angst, Adrian decides it’s time to try Sike: the new lauded and elite AI psychotherapy app that tracks your every move and emotion, and guides you toward mental contentment.

He soon falls for Maquie, a smart and pragmatic venture capitalist scouring London’s tech scene for the next business boom. She can see no potential investments though, nothing sparkles. She wants to find a business as successful as Sike, and yet she is also one of the holdouts who refuse to use it.

Shifting between Adrian and Maquie’s perspectives as it tracks the fraught first year of their relationship, Sike is a story of two people wrestling with connection, identity, anxiety, success, and the limits of our obsession with self-analysis and awareness.

For fans of Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun and the modern love stories of Sally Rooney, Fred Lunzer’s debut novel brings us an incisive and intimate deep dive into the reach for clarity by a curious and ambitious, anxious and irresolute generation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250343123
Publisher:	Celadon Books
Publication date:	05/20/2025
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Fred Lunzer was born in London in 1988. He moved to Tokyo at age six, and lived there on and off as a child and adult. His work in business and AI strategy crossed fields that include life sciences, music, ethics, and gastronomy, and he completed an MBA in Barcelona in 2019. Throughout, he wrote journalism, short stories, poetry, and novels. He holds British and German citizenship, and lives in London.

Editorial Reviews

"Part love story, Part A.I. story, Fred Lunzer’s SIKE is that rare thing, a beautifully written novel that’s both ingenious and ingenuous. It’s of the moment, certainly, but for all its knowledge and knowingness—about tech and philosophy and bar culture and rap lyrics—it takes its polyglot, globetrotting characters on the most old-fashioned journey of all: a trip straight to the heart. I’ve never read anything quite like it.”

—Joshua Henkin, author of Morningside Heights and The World Without You

"Reading the insightful, clever, and tender SIKE is like having your best friend continuously whisper hair-raising truths in your ear. A story about art, ambition, self-knowledge, and most of all, love, Fred Lunzer’s winning novel accomplishes what the best speculative fiction does, showing us that a window to the future is ultimately a mirror that reflects back our wobbly, ridiculous, and luminous selves.

—Katie Williams, author of My Murder and Tell the Machine Good Night

“Sike’s sexy, provocative take on AI and modern love is a trenchant reminder that novels by real people enrich our inner lives more effectively than iPhones ever will.”

—James Hannaham, author of Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta and Delicious Foods

"Lunzer is eager to demonstrate his awareness of the thorny issues his book raises, and initially succeeds with clever, self-assured prose...delightful phrasing and figurative language... A smart, elaborate, and discursive modern romance."

—Kirkus Review

"There’s plenty to like from Lunzer: a knack for knitting together elegant exposition; a keen sense of the pacing of scene... In the end, the novel is a sincere representation of two young professionals finding love and companionship."

—Washington Post

From the Publisher

2025-04-19
Two ambitious and cerebral young adults navigate their relationships and careers with (or without) the psychoanalytical help of artificial intelligence.

Adrian, a 27-year-old rap lyric ghostwriter, is enjoying the recent glow of a writing credit on a track raking in millions of streams. Maquie, a 28-year-old half Japanese, half Swedish data maven, uses her predictive model to help a venture capital fund spot worthy investments. These two spend their days pub-hopping in London with friends, contemplating topics like rap, business, love, and most significantly, Sike, an AI psychotherapy app that tracks “subtle changes in your personality, while a real-life psychologist can’t (or won’t).” As Adrian and Maquie start seeing each other, Adrian often consults Sike for advice (although using Sike in public is “considered a little graceless, like giving real estate advice, or discussing crypto”). The therapeutic authority of Sike’s AI language is particularly engrossing, but while the benefits of Sike are vaunted, the dangers and potential complications of such a breakthrough in mental health technology are only disappointingly glanced at. Lunzer is eager to demonstrate his awareness of the thorny issues his book raises, and initially succeeds with clever, self-assured prose. He even acknowledges the uncomfortable “race and…class thing” of Adrian being a “white and university-educated North London Jew,” an identity Lunzer discloses only after painting Adrian as a passionate and encyclopedic student of hip-hop history. But Lunzer’s acrobatic exposition stumbles in the second act. The emotional truths of Adrian and Maquie’s lives are muted through overintellectualization; much more oxygen is given to granular snippets of privileged life in an alternate present-day reality. Still, Lunzer relishes in delightful phrasing and figurative language; Maquie is once described “as though the jaws of an unpleasant thought had snapped at her eyes from inside her head.”

A smart, elaborate, and discursive modern romance.

Kirkus Reviews