Moderation

Girlie Delmundo is the greatest content moderator in the world — which means she spends her days processing humanity's worst impulses, making split-second decisions about what gets to exist online, and dissociating just enough to keep doing it. When her parent company acquires a virtual reality platform and promotes her to moderate immersive historical worlds, she finds herself falling, against all her careful management of her own interior life, for the company's co-founder. Castillo uses the romance to do what the novel's satire alone couldn't: show what years of moderation cost a person's capacity for genuine feeling, and what it means when that capacity reasserts itself anyway. The colonial thread running through the novel is not incidental — Castillo traces why so many of the world's content moderators happen to be Filipino all the way back to US imperial ambitions documented at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, where Filipinos were put on display as primitive subjects of American empire, and forward through a century of labor shaped by that relationship. There is always another bottom yawning open below. The direct companion to Severance on the shelf — both novels center non-white women whose outsider perspective gives them the clearest view of what tech capitalism is actually doing to the people inside it, and both use genre to say what literary realism cannot quite reach. Top Ten Books of 2025: The Atlantic, Slate. Best of 2025: The New Yorker, TIME. 2026 Women's Prize for Fiction longlist.