Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. A very sharp and funny novel. After spending time with interesting young people, Cassandra and Aaron, Malcolm and Violet and Antonia, you begin to see why this intellectual generation never gets married, much less pulls it together enough to think about kids. Even as you laugh at the messes that they twist themselves into, you do want to reach into the pages and shake some common sense into most of them. When an old friend, Sam, suddenly dies it does make a few of them wonder how they’re living, it really takes a world wide shutdown to really make them face who they really are and try and change. Such a clear eyed book about who we are.

This was an extremely relatable read for me not just as a millennial but as someone who can relate to parts of every character and obviously the pandemic as a back drop. The characters were great and so many themes hit home. As the characters navigate life, a pandemic, relationships, addictions, careers and losses it’s fascinating to watch it all unfold. I laughed, I cringed, I frowned. What an amazing book.
I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

Review will be posted on Instagram and Amazon on pub day and links added to NetGalley.

Andrew Martin writes about flawed, restless people with such precision that it almost hurts. Down Time is a novel about aging without really growing up, about clinging to bad habits and old identities even as life insists on moving forward. The book is funny—sometimes painfully so—but underneath the wit there’s real tenderness for these characters, even when they’re at their worst. What struck me most was how Martin balances satire with empathy; I found myself laughing one page and then quietly gutted the next. It’s a sharp, humane novel about friendship, failure, and the messy search for meaning.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for providing an eARC of Down Time prior to publication.

A thoughtful, frequently hilarious novel about a set of friends struggling to figure out how to live, Down Time perfectly captures the odd experience of being in your thirties, neither young nor middle-aged (yet), but plagued by a nagging sensation that you should already have figured it out. Martin is a sharp, observant writer, balancing pathos with incisive wry wit. Even as his characters wallow in the depths of ennui, despair, and self-absorption, they remain exquisitely human and excruciatingly relatable. Down Time is a novel for everyone who has come to the begrudging realization that adulthood is often nothing more than fumbling through your days, hoping for meaning and certainty.

Down Time follows Cassandra, Aaron, Antonia and Malcolm as they navigate their lives including the Covid pandemic. Aaron is an alcoholic and relies on his girlfriend Cassandra to keep him alive. He cheats on her, embarrasses her with his drinking and expects Cassandra to pay for everything. She hasn’t left him but she is more like his mother than a girlfriend. Cassandra and Aaron are friends with Malcolm who has his own issues with alcoholism and depression. His girlfriend Violet is a doctor who doesn’t have much patience for Malcolm and struggles during the pandemic. Antonia wrote a book about ecocide and hopes it will get her tenure at a prestigious university near Harvard Square. Their friend Sam dies and then the Covid pandemic makes them contend with their lives.

This is such an excellent book and it is like it was written for me. I loved it and connected to each character. Each character had issues and it was easy to relate to how messy they were. None of these characters really know what they are doing with their lives and I just found that so relatable and realistic. It has the vibe of just living life day by day and seeing what happens. I didn’t think I would enjoy novels about Covid but I found this to be very cathartic. The writing was brilliant and I found this to be such a compelling read. This was told from the POV of each character and I found the character voices to be distinct and real. I will be recommending this and I think it should be on everyone’s anticipated books for 2026. I loved this so much and I cannot stop thinking about how good this was.

This is a novel about a collection of befuddled, depressive 30-year-olds getting their lives—specifically, their romantic relationships—snow globe-shaken by the death of a friend and the Covid pandemic. I enjoyed the cast of characters and how their stories intertwined. Mostly, though, I like Andrew Martin’s authorial voice—dry, wry, elegant, novelistic handling of description, psychology, and interiority, which holds true across the multiple characters’ points of view. He’s funny! Great book!

Clever, funny, gripping, and refreshing. I flew through this and would follow these characters anywhere. It's tough to write a compelling "pandemic" book, but Andrew Martin has done it. So perfectly captures the millennial malaise of the early 2020s.