Castle, The: Adventures in a World of Unravelling Men (PB) - C-format

The million-copy bestselling author of The Psychopath Test returns with a shocking, darkly comic trip to the furthest reaches of the masculinity crisis. - I honestly have no clue what is going on. This is very weird. We left. Was completely fucked. All good now. When Jon Ronson received a series of disquieting texts from his son Joel who'd been lured to a mysterious castle in the forests of New England late one night, it sets Ronson Sr. off on an adventure into an underworld of unmoored and disaffected men. As Jon deepens his investigation into the castle and the wider 'man crisis' - where some are feeling tossed around in a sea of conflicting ideologies of what it means to be a man - urgent questions come to light. What exactly is 'Princessing'? Why did a lawn care influencer dress as a baby in front of billions of online viewers, with catastrophic results? And more pressingly, why are two recently released murderers on their way to pay Jon a visit? From the death of utopian factory towns to the false promise of YouTube influencer culture, Jon shows us our rapidly changing world like never before, and the men caught in the middle. A world drained of purpose, of collapsing institutions, where a new era of disinhibited behaviour has taken hold of our online and real-world selves. And as the castle mystery twists and turns into a cat-and-mouse story, will Jon be able to discover its terrifying secret hidden from the world? Utterly hilarious and criminally entertaining, this is one of our greatest non-fiction writers at the top of his game: diagnosing our societal frailties in a narrative of blistering pace, insight and intensity. ‘The Castle explores the nature of male anxiety, the spiralling delusions of the internet, the destructive allure of anti-woke defiance, the obsequious flattery of AI chatbots, the impunity of the mega-rich and so many other subtle (and not so subtle) currents that are currently roiling our existence ...’ - Patrick Radden Keefe.