Like you have a choice

Feeling well-adjusted? This book will fix that.

Welcome to Melbourne, a city where the coffee is single-origin and the existential dread is locally sourced. In this town of curated lifestyles and performative wellness, a band of charming misfits is doing their best to keep it weird.

There’s Igor, who has discovered the only known cure for depression: mainlining the cringe of amateur slam poetry. There’s Hector, a man whose biceps are less inflated than his ego, on a sacred quest for a gold pendant. And then there are the rest of them: the corporate zombies, the festival-loving nomads, and the spiritually bankrupt, all flailing beautifully in a sea of organic kombucha and poor life choices.

From a wellness spa that promises to "unsag everything" to a Cypriot restaurant where the bathrooms have seen more action than a UN peacekeeping force, "Like You Have a Choice" is a riotous tour of the places we go to escape ourselves. With a wit as sharp as a shard of artisanal sourdough, Ivan Niccolai lovingly dissects the anxieties and absurdities of our times.

Come for the laughs. Stay for the crushing realisation that you might be one of these people.