With the rise of artificial intelligence and the uncertain geopolitical environment, it seems appropriate to start 2025 with some surreal fiction.

In Blob: A Love Story, a young Taiwanese-American woman named Vi stumbles upon a “beige gelatin splotch” with mouth, eyes and lips next to a rubbish bin outside a dive bar, takes it home, feeds it and helps it morph into a real man.

That is the plot summary in brief, but the book is a whole lot weirder than that.

First-time novelist Maggie Su has fun letting Vi essentially mould her ideal man – “He doesn’t look like any one movie star but rather a conglomeration of movie stars” – but the story is not played entirely for laughs.

Creating and interacting with Bob the blob – yes, that is the name she gives him – gives Vi plenty of time to think about her own life. She is uneasy about the way she treats so-called friends and has not yet come to terms with a recent break-up.