Touch Grass (Mary Colussi, Penguin)

Mary Colussi’s debut novel, Touch Grass, is the sharp and inventive winner of the 2025 Penguin Literary Prize. This work of speculative fiction takes readers into the not-too-distant future, where strawberries are a nostalgic memory, parents can sell their child’s life rights for profit, and your past can be erased for the right price. Protagonist Charlie is a deletion specialist at Fresh Start, a company that makes things disappear from the internet. She’s also one of several people experiencing a strange new phenomenon where her consciousness is spontaneously ejected from her body. Charlie has little to tie her to the physical world in the way of family, friends, purpose or desire, and occasionally being ejected into the ether to become one with a cactus isn’t a terrible use of her time. But when Big Brother gets involved, the story (or lack thereof) of Charlie’s life begins to reveal itself. Touch Grass is a clever and incisive story that holds a mirror up to our era of social media and distorted reality. Through clever storytelling and keen societal observation, Colussi explores the enormous themes of unreliable memory, ego and sense of self, social media and unregulated technologies, and future consequences of current actions. Touch Grass is an immersive and surprising novel for fans of Melissa Broder’s Death Valley, Sayaka Murata’s Vanishing World and Yōko Ogawa’s The Memory Police.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Danielle Bagnato is a book reviewer and marketing and communications professional. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

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