Preview

Prime logo Prime members: New to Audible?
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Bonding

By: Mariel Franklin
Narrated by: Ellie Kendrick
Try for $0.00

$14.95/month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $15.72

Buy for $15.72

Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.

Publisher's summary

'I absolutely loved it. Anyone interested in the relationship between tech, our bodies and our minds should bump it to the top of their queue immediately' - Zadie Smith, author of The Fraud

'This smart, disturbing debut reads like a 19th-century novel of manners for the digital age . . . Franklin has written one of the most stimulating novels I have read' - The Times

Electrifying, urgent, and darkly funny, Mariel Franklin's debut Bonding is a uniquely modern story of sex, tech and freedom in the messy tangle of our digital age.

Adrift in her early thirties, Mary is exhausted by an endless cycle of casual relationships and unstable work. When she loses her job, she books a spontaneous trip to Ibiza and meets Tom, a brilliant chemist on the verge of launching a new antidepressant: a drug called Eudaxa that claims to be able to cure the anxieties of modern life.

Back in London, Mary runs into the volatile and driven Lara, who has channelled her ambitions into Openr, an innovative dating app designed to revolutionise the industry. Mary and Lara have a complicated past, and as she begins working for Openr and falling for Tom, tech and pharma collide with shocking consequences, forcing Mary to question what love and success mean in a world that is hurtling out of control.

'Audacious, hot, deeply uncomfortable and genuinely thrilling' - Saba Sams, author of Send Nudes

©2024 Mariel Franklin (P)2024 Macmillan Publishers International Limited

Critic reviews

Somewhere between Big Pharma-topia and dating app start-ups is Bonding’s biggest surprise – and it’s heart-shaped. Part love story, part love-mare, Bonding asks big, bold questions about the future of human relations and relationships (Sarah May, author of Becky)
Franklin arranges her vision of the contemporary moment in a way that makes the reader see our predicament anew. She is a seer and this novel of ideas is funny, sexy and surprising. (Luke Brown, author Theft)
Franklin is a fearless writer. In Bonding, she has written a novel that is somehow both timely and timeless. (Keiran Goddard, author of I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning)

What listeners say about Bonding

Average customer ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.