Book of the week: The Contrarian by Max Chafkin

Dave Eggers’ new novel is a sequel to The Circle, his hugely successful 2013 satire about a “Facebook proxy”, said Dominic Maxwell in The Times. In this follow-up, The Circle has rebranded itself as The Every, after swallowing up a rival known as “The Jungle”.

Delaney, a new employee, is a closet hater of “surveillance capitalism”, and plans to bring the company down from the inside by launching a series of technologies so preposterous they’ll turn people against it.

Her inventions include the “relationship-wrecking app” Friendy – which can “detect whether your friend or partner is being truthful” – and Stop+Lük, an eye-tracking technology. Full of “horribly good jokes”, The Every is a “remarkable piece of satire”.

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Predictably, Delaney’s scheme veers off track, said Rob Doyle in The Observer. Regular people, instead of rejecting her “moronic apps”, are so inured to having their freedom curtailed that they embrace them with gusto. The Every isn’t perfect – its plotting is “clunky” in places – but it advances lots of interesting ideas, “in the form of gulpable fictive entertainment”.

Hamish Hamilton 608pp £12.99; The Week Bookshop £9.99

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