Elaine Castillo made the Financial Times' "30 of the Planet's Most Exciting Young People," and her debut novel, "America Is Not the Heart," was named a best book of 2018 by NPR, Lit Hub, Kirkus Reviews and more outlets.

Her new book is "Moderation." Here, she takes the Book Pages Q&A.

Please tell readers about your new book.

I keep saying "Moderation" is a novel about two people who are wrong about the genre the story of their lives is being told in: one thinks he's in a corporate espionage revenge thriller about the collusion between the tech industry and the rise of the far right, the other thinks she's in a gritty immigrant drama about content moderators and racialized labor in the post-2008 economic climate -- and actually, they're both in a Jane Austen-style romance.

The novel's main character is a content moderator, essentially one of the frontline workers of the internet: she filters through the most harrowing extremes of violent content, every day, so that civilians like us don't have to see that content in our Facebook feeds and Instagram grids. Then, one day, she's offered a mysterious and lucrative position as an elite moderator, for a cutting-edge virtual reality landscape ... and the rest of the book unfolds from there.

Ultimately, it's a novel about labor, harm, and love as a practice of world-building, love as maybe the most sci-fi fantasy idea of all.