Women's Prize for Fiction Longlist 2026 | Frankie recommends... Moderation - Elaine Castillo

Frankie says... A surprisingly warmhearted book that was unlike most modern 'romances'! Taut and often funny writing, Castillo crafts a millennial protagonist who is too smart for her own good. A convincing and deft investigation of the Chinese diaspora in a tech-fuelled American economy and a definite read for those who like books about technology, politics in the virtual space and lowkey yearning. A literary VR success - want romance but don't like cookie-cutter contemporary stuff with little political awareness? This is the book for you!

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Thirty-something Girlie Delmundo works a day job as a content moderator, flagging and removing the very worst that makes it on to the internet. She's one of the best at it, too - dispassionate, unflinching, maybe because she learned by necessity to wall off all her emotions when she was still a kid - so it's no surprise to anyone when the social-media company for which she works offers her a big salary rise and an office to start moderating its new venture: virtual-reality theme parks, lush and near-perfect simulations of civilizations long since dead. Girlie takes the job, and getting paid to spend her days wandering the crowds of medieval jousts or exploring romantic Left Bank Paris seems too good to be true.

Almost. Sure, she signed up for having to deal with the sordidness of pretty much any virtual space, but as she begins to explore the intricate worlds that she moderates, she notices two deeply troubling things: that there might be something much darker built into the very code of the company, and that William, technically her new boss, a man whose barriers are as mighty as her own, might just be that long-forgotten thing... Girlie's type.