"Interesting facts about space" by Emily Austin

An audio book.

Enid, 26, a lesbian active in the online dating scene, works as an Info Architect for NASA. When she was little, her father went off with Gina. She has 2 half-sisters who she first met 2 years before at her father's funeral. One of them is about to have gender-reveal parties.

She's deaf in one ear. She's scared of bald men. She thinks her soul is a parasite/alien. She avoids intimate conversation with her mother, telling her instead facts about astronomy. The facts have symbolic interpretations. For example, a planet can sometimes survive its sun going supernova. When the star's white dwarf the planet closes in.

At school she had a boyfriend Ben who'd left Chelsea (who used to bully Enid) for her.

She's been seeing a woman whose wife Polly wants to chat with her. Polly says that the marriage isn't going well and wants to shower with Enid.

Her mother is depressed. She was comatose on the floor once. Enid phoned for an ambulance. She was called she phoned just in time.

Enid suspects a peeping Tom is around, bald. She's scared of sleeping alone in her flat - somebody's been in. She goes to a therapist who tells her to stop listening to true crime podcasts (but she and her lover enjoy discussing them). Was her father bald? Was she assaulted by a bald man? The therapist thinks she has PTSD.

Enid's program is buggy - when she searches for "Enid" she gets details about an exo-planet. A colleague goes out with one of her ex's. A new colleague arrives, George. Because he's bald she avoids contact with him. She learns that he's into true crime too.

She remembers that her school caught fire, that a schoolboy had died, his hair burnt away. Had she set the school alight? Her father thought so. Maybe that explains her baldness phobia? Her mother tells her that Chelsea had phoned her father to spread rumours - Enid was innocent. She discovers that it was Vin who'd come into her house to check how she was. She makes up with a girlfriend. At the end she solves the bug at work. Vin says "You're a star".

Other reviews

• boosybooworm (the story's tone frequently felt oddly zany, and the pacing felt uneven to me. At times the novel was so absurd as to seem slapstick, so that the important issues underlying the story were potentially poignant but not actually (for me) so. The bald-man phobia and the stalker premise were each so over the top in their willfully delayed resolutions, I felt myself growing irritated.)