“What should a person be like?” is the question that the book’s heroine, Sheila, is trying to answer, along with her closest friend Margot and their friends - contemporary artists and intellectuals living in Toronto these days. The characters in the book try to find their place in life, in creativity and in relationships with people, travel, try different professions, and find themselves in sad and absurd situations. A sudden conflict with her best friend forces the heroine writer to look at herself and her life differently. “What should a person be like?” is an ironic mixture of autobiography and fiction, written in a bold, modern, vibrant and imaginative language. Sheela Kheti writes in search of meaning, while simultaneously depriving the act of writing and language of sacred meaning. Constantly switching between prose and dramatic dialogue, including fragments of email correspondence, she disorients the reader, breaking the rhythm of the narrative whenever it becomes familiar. The rules of the game in the novel are reassembled again and again with the same seriousness and slyness with which the title question itself sounds in the 21st century.

The book contains obscene language!