The Perfect Match
Seven women compete on a rigged reality dating show for a billionaire they never see. The challenges grow stranger, the eliminations grow crueler, and the man behind it all has reasons for watching that none of them suspect.
Seven women arrive at a tropical island for the chance to marry a man they have never met. A billionaire, the producers say. A romantic. Generous beyond reason.
The host is a different animal. The smile of a man who would wax his Porsche with a woman's tears and post the tutorial on YouTube. His name is Colac. He runs them through challenges built to humiliate. A quiz calibrated to their personal histories. A motherhood trial with mechanical dolls. A finishing school with a woman who was born before television. Every week another contestant gets sent home, and every week the remaining ones tell themselves it is worth it. For what is waiting at the end.
Somewhere on the island, a man watches. He has told himself this is a love story. He has told himself many things.
The Perfect Match is a savage literary satire for readers who tore through Ruth Ware's One Perfect Couple, laughed through R.F. Kuang's Yellowface, and still think about the hollow men of American Psycho. Reality television meets Lord of the Flies meets the slow, dawning suspicion that paradise was never the point.