You cannot go wrong with Amitava Kumar. He has written on ethnic diversity in India, the threat of religious nationalism. This book is about his thoughts as he is invited to a prestigious scholarly retreat in Italy. I really enjoy the way he writes and he talks about the many ways we process information in our current world.

My apologies but I was not able to finish reading this one. I read about a third of the book and wasn't compelled to continue for various reasons.

While it is a dystopian apocalyptic novel, it has the feel of one. Satya, born in India but having lived most of his life in the US, is in a luxurious villa on an Italian island. He is at an artist’s residency where he is writing a novel on fake news. While the novel goes nowhere, and he ends up spending most of his time in despair as he reads the headlines of the news both in the US and India. In the early days of the COVID crisis, there’s plenty of misinformation for him to collect. His wife is back in the US and their conversations seem to go nowhere as well. They just keep rehashing the problems of their nine-year old daughter telling lies and whit works best positive or negative reinforcement. There wasn’t much reason for me to keep reading. The book went nowhere.