We Had To Remove This Post

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Kayleigh needs money. That's why she takes a job as a content moderator for a social media platform whose name she isn't allowed to mention. Her job: reviewing offensive videos and pictures, rants and conspiracy theories, and deciding which need to be removed. It's gruelling work. Kayleigh and her colleagues spend all day watching horrors and hate on their screens, evaluating them with the platform's ever-changing moderating guidelines. Yet Kayleigh is good at her job and in her colleagues, she finds a group of friends, even a new girlfriend - and for the first time in her life, Kayleigh's future seems bright. But soon the job seems to change them all, shifting their worlds in alarming ways. But when her colleagues begin to break down; when Sigrid, her new girlfriend, grows increasingly distant and fragile; when her friends start espousing the very conspiracy theories they're meant to be evaluating; Kayleigh begins to wonder if the job may be too much for them. She's still totally fine, though - or is she We Had To Remove This Post by Hanna Bervoets is a chilling, powerful and urgent story about what - or who - determines how we see the world. PRAISE FOR WE HAD TO REMOVE THIS POST 'The dank underside of social media, its cruelty and delusions, have become, our shared affliction. It needed an accomplished novelist to explore humanely the damage. Hanna Bervoets has richly obliged in this superbly poised, psychologically astute and subtle novel of mental unravelling. At its wonderful, hallucinatory climax, Kayleigh, the shattered protagonist, asks on our behalf the one true question, and the spellbound reader will usefully struggle for an answer.' Ian McEwan, author of Atonement

Reviews

Acid-dipped novella . . . a glimpse of the foetid underbelly of the internet and a sobering consideration of who is deciding what we see, and at what cost. -- Siobhan Murphy * The Times *
A chilling page-turner . . . the unreliable narrator gives it a strong literary heartbeat and its richly suspenseful too. With a few deft strokes [Bervoets] manages to incorporate all of the ills of social media into one concise story . . . utterly haunting. -- Johanna Thomas-Corr * The Sunday Times *
The setting alone is compelling and has always been in need of an accomplished novelists attention . . . The dreamlike climax of the final pages is beautifully wrought. Men might usefully confront in Bervoets a writerly intelligence at once so tender and so willing to look into the abyss. -- Ian McEwan * The Guardian *
Bervoets' neat dissection of morality is as taut as a thriller, sharp as a slug of ice-cold vodka. -- Catherine Taylor * Irish Times *
Surprising and enigmatic . . . intriguing and frustrating . . . As we spend more and more time in the trickmirror of the internet, how can we know what or whom to believe -- Laura van den Berg * The New York Times *
A very modern tale about the dark side of the internet. * The Times 'Best Books of Summer' *
Hanna Bervoet's slim, compelling novel We Had to Remove This Post addresses the foetid morass of social media . . . Bevoets is often acidly funny, especially when demonstraring the workers' mordant, jockish humour. * TLS *
The dank underside of social media, its cruelty and delusions . . . Hanna Bervoets has richly obliged in this superbly poised, psychologically astute and subtle novel of mental unravelling. -- Ian McEwan, author of Atonement
Extremely gripping and intense edgy queer novel -- Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes The Form Of A Mortal Girl
This novel gives us an acid glimpse into a new form of labor existing today, a job that extracts an immeasurable psychic toll. Fascinating and disturbing. -- Ling Ma, author of Severance
An astonishing and compelling cast of characters, drawn together through circumstance, separated by the same. The novel is fast paced and thrilling, violent and nightmarish and grief-stricken, but also tender and wildly moving. -- Kristen Arnett, author of Mostly Dead Things and With Teeth
I thought it was incredible and has real cult potential. -- Alice Slater * Tik Tok *
Powerful, discussable, and a harbinger of a voice-in-translation to watch. * Booklist Starred Review *
Scathing, darkly humorous exploration of the impact of VR, IR . . . Bervoets just gets it. This is, unironically, a novel for our time. * Kirkus Starred Review *
Magnetic . . . Bervoets frames the story like a mystery, slowly revealing the fractured relationships and circumstances that drove Kayleigh away from her job. * Publishers Weekly *

Author Bio

Hanna Bervoets is one of the most acclaimed Dutch writers of her generation. She is the author of several novels in her home country of the Netherlands, and she has also written screenplays, plays, short stories, and essays. She is the recipient of many literary awards, including the prestigious Frans Kellendonk Prize for her entire body of work. She was a resident at Art Omi: Writers at Ledig House, New York, and currently works and lives in Amsterdam with her girlfriend and two guinea pigs. We Had to Remove This Post has been translated into thirteen languages and is her first book to be translated into English.