Like you have a choice

by Ivan Niccolai

Feeling well-adjusted? This book will fix that.

Welcome to Melbourne, a city where the coffee is single-origin and the existential dread is locally sourced. In this town of curated lifestyles and performative wellness, a band of charming misfits is doing their best to keep it weird.

There’s Igor, who has discovered the only known cure for mainlining the cringe of amateur slam poetry. There’s Hector, a man whose biceps are less inflated than his ego, on a sacred quest for a gold pendant. And then there are the rest of the corporate zombies, the festival-loving nomads, and the spiritually bankrupt, all flailing beautifully in a sea of organic kombucha and poor life choices.

From a wellness spa that promises to "unsag everything" to a Cypriot restaurant where the bathrooms have seen more action than a UN peacekeeping force, "Like You Have a Choice" is a riotous tour of the places we go to escape ourselves. With a wit as sharp as a shard of artisanal sourdough, Ivan Niccolai lovingly dissects the anxieties and absurdities of our times.

Come for the laughs. Stay for the crushing realisation that you might be one of these people.

100 pages, Paperback

Published August 6, 2025

Reviews

[Chanel Chapters · Rating 5 out of 5]

A city so weird, even the bathrooms have stories dirtier than your search history

4.75⭐️

[Lewis Woolston · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an impressive and original debut. The sheer originality and creativity of it stands out like a beacon over the dismal modern literary scene.
Sure, one can see certain influences, Brett Easton Ellis perhaps or maybe J.G Ballard, but the book is overwhelmingly new and exciting.
Melbourne, that hipster-infested capitalist dystopia of modern Australia, is the setting for the bulk of the stories here. It's primarily the sharp, competitive and ugly side of Melbourne that gets the attention. The soulless corporate dystopia that sucks the life out of anyone who participates. The coked up parties full of degenerate idiots and desperados. The lonely, tiny apartments and the lonely tiny lives within them. All get examined under Niccolai's sharp eyes.
Ivan Niccolai is a brilliant new talent. I hope he writes more and in a just world he'd become a major new talent in the Australian literary scene.

[Weston · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awesome, biting reflection of grunge life Melbourne and more.
Real. Beat is still alive and its in St Kilda.

[Liam Blackford · Rating 4 out of 5]

"If what the west truly yearned for, their forbidden desire, was another frontier - that and a masochistic desire to be punished for this desire - the way they'd used his continent barely a hundred years earlier, the way their richest billionaires play acted their science fiction fantasies of space exploration, the way they obsessed about camping and escaping civilisation for the great outdoors - then Ephraim would show them vast new frontiers of disorientation that didn't require travel to distant lands. He would disorient them in their very homes. In the anger and bewilderment of the mad in the streets of Melbourne he read instead souls better in touch with their culture's longings for the future and the frontier. They would become a key part of his plan."