The Fountain

Kat Giordano

In the aftermath of her first serious long-term relationship, the book’s protagonist, a 22-year-old woman caught in the loop of a dead-end data entry job, takes a trip out of the city to collect her thoughts and visit her friend, Sidney, at her hometown. Every year, Sidney throws a loosely-defined “festival” in which she invites her wide and widely-varied circle of friends [and their friends (and their acquaintances)] to stay in her family’s empty house for a long weekend of debauchery. This time, however, she’s looking for a distraction, and she finds it in the form of Jay, a 40-something manual laborer who wastes no time in prying into her various emotional and existential burdens.