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Empathy
Marketing executive Alison Morris bets her reputation on a project to sell empathy in a perfume bottle. Her husband, Jim, is inspired to try a similar thing in a game he’s developing - sinking all their money into EmPath, where people progress by learning to understand one another without direct communication. All at once Alison’s fragrance develops dangerous effects and Jim’s game falters in the market, then the chemist working on the perfume project vanishes. His son, David, seems to be the only one looking for him. A widower with two children, David is a man of routine who just wants to get on with his life, but his love for his father takes him into a murky world where empathy can be bought and sold and can lead to murder.
296 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 8, 2026
3.5*. Slow paced crime but I enjoyed it.
February 12, 2026
What if you could bottle empathy? Market it. Monetise it. Scale it.
Alison Morris is a marketing executive who stakes her reputation on doing exactly that — launching a fragrance designed to make people feel more deeply connected. Meanwhile, her husband Jim pours their savings into a video game built on the same premise: players advance not through violence or speed, but by learning to understand each other without speaking.
It’s a bold idea. It’s also a disaster waiting to happen.
When Alison’s perfume begins to have dangerous side effects, Jim’s game stalls in the market, and the chemist behind the fragrance vanishes, the story shifts into darker territory. Enter David — the chemist’s recently widowed son, raising two children and clinging to routine as a way of surviving his grief. He isn’t looking for trouble. He’s looking for his father. And what he finds is a world where empathy isn’t just a virtue - it’s a commodity. One that can be exploited. Even weaponised.
Longlisted for the Ockham NZ Book Awards for Fiction, this is smart, unsettling, and beautifully written.
The writing is top notch. Clean, controlled, confident. The interlinking storylines are handled so well - you move between characters and perspectives with ease, never feeling lost, always feeling pulled forward.
Alison is fascinating - driven by scarcity, by fear, by the need to keep everything from collapsing. She makes questionable choices, absolutely. But they’re rooted in survival, and that makes her hard to judge too harshly. Jim, on the other hand, floats through life on a cloud of “she’ll be right.” For every anxious spiral Alison has, Jim seems convinced it will all magically sort itself out. His nonchalance borders on infuriating.
And then there’s David. Recently widowed, doing his best for his two children, suddenly thrown into chaos when his father disappears. I completely fell for him. His grief, his steadiness, his quiet determination - he brings a real emotional centre to the story.
If you’re picking this up expecting a high-octane thriller, you might find it a little restrained. There’s enough plot to keep you turning the pages, but the tension is more simmer than explosion. It’s more interested in ideas - about connection, capitalism, grief, and what happens when we try to engineer something as complex as empathy.
Which is exactly why it would make a brilliant book club choice. So much to unpack. So many moral grey areas. So many “but would you?” moments.
Deserving of its longlisting, and I’ll absolutely be reading more by Walpert.
Alison Morris is a marketing executive who stakes her reputation on doing exactly that — launching a fragrance designed to make people feel more deeply connected. Meanwhile, her husband Jim pours their savings into a video game built on the same premise: players advance not through violence or speed, but by learning to understand each other without speaking.
It’s a bold idea. It’s also a disaster waiting to happen.
When Alison’s perfume begins to have dangerous side effects, Jim’s game stalls in the market, and the chemist behind the fragrance vanishes, the story shifts into darker territory. Enter David — the chemist’s recently widowed son, raising two children and clinging to routine as a way of surviving his grief. He isn’t looking for trouble. He’s looking for his father. And what he finds is a world where empathy isn’t just a virtue - it’s a commodity. One that can be exploited. Even weaponised.
Longlisted for the Ockham NZ Book Awards for Fiction, this is smart, unsettling, and beautifully written.
The writing is top notch. Clean, controlled, confident. The interlinking storylines are handled so well - you move between characters and perspectives with ease, never feeling lost, always feeling pulled forward.
Alison is fascinating - driven by scarcity, by fear, by the need to keep everything from collapsing. She makes questionable choices, absolutely. But they’re rooted in survival, and that makes her hard to judge too harshly. Jim, on the other hand, floats through life on a cloud of “she’ll be right.” For every anxious spiral Alison has, Jim seems convinced it will all magically sort itself out. His nonchalance borders on infuriating.
And then there’s David. Recently widowed, doing his best for his two children, suddenly thrown into chaos when his father disappears. I completely fell for him. His grief, his steadiness, his quiet determination - he brings a real emotional centre to the story.
If you’re picking this up expecting a high-octane thriller, you might find it a little restrained. There’s enough plot to keep you turning the pages, but the tension is more simmer than explosion. It’s more interested in ideas - about connection, capitalism, grief, and what happens when we try to engineer something as complex as empathy.
Which is exactly why it would make a brilliant book club choice. So much to unpack. So many moral grey areas. So many “but would you?” moments.
Deserving of its longlisting, and I’ll absolutely be reading more by Walpert.
March 5, 2026
Longlisted for the Ockham NZ Book Awards, Bryan Walpert's absorbing new novel Empathy was unlucky not to make the shortlist. I had just finished reading it and was mulling over the cunning way that the theme plays out when the news came through. I can't really comment on the shortlist of four because the only title I've read (is Catherine Chidgey's The Book of Guilt (2025, see my review) and the other three are proving hard to get hold of, but they must be very good indeed to have trumped Empathy and Wonderland, (see my review) for a place on the shortlist.
nyway...
What makes Empathy such a powerful novel is the way it speaks to our yearning for a less divisive world. No matter how carefully we curate our ventures into social media (in my case, that means only BlueSky, Goodreads and (reluctantly) Facebook to keep abreast of family overseas, and no matter how scrupulously we avoid the nastiness of of Twitter, Instagram and TikTok, we still know about its malevolent effects because legacy media sites feed on it. Scan through their tabloid headlines and you can see the hashtags bleeding through. These days, being 'informed' means being tainted by the unfiltered basic instincts of people we would never otherwise want to have in our lives.
Walpert's novel humanises the quest to create a fix for the miasma in which we find ourselves. It traces the way a chemical solution to this quest derives from the interaction between commercial opportunism and the idealistic desire for greater connectedness. If empathy in a perfume can be developed in a lab, then monetised and marketed, there's money to be made and the manufacturer looks like a good corporate citizen. If a role-playing video game that rewards empathetic choices can be developed, a start-up company can make near-instant wealth if it becomes very popular. What could go wrong? The world needs more empathy, right?
Walpert's novel does not allow a naïve answer to that question. Exploring the limits of empathy as an unmitigated good, he shows that the answer depends on context.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2026/03/05/e...
nyway...
What makes Empathy such a powerful novel is the way it speaks to our yearning for a less divisive world. No matter how carefully we curate our ventures into social media (in my case, that means only BlueSky, Goodreads and (reluctantly) Facebook to keep abreast of family overseas, and no matter how scrupulously we avoid the nastiness of of Twitter, Instagram and TikTok, we still know about its malevolent effects because legacy media sites feed on it. Scan through their tabloid headlines and you can see the hashtags bleeding through. These days, being 'informed' means being tainted by the unfiltered basic instincts of people we would never otherwise want to have in our lives.
Walpert's novel humanises the quest to create a fix for the miasma in which we find ourselves. It traces the way a chemical solution to this quest derives from the interaction between commercial opportunism and the idealistic desire for greater connectedness. If empathy in a perfume can be developed in a lab, then monetised and marketed, there's money to be made and the manufacturer looks like a good corporate citizen. If a role-playing video game that rewards empathetic choices can be developed, a start-up company can make near-instant wealth if it becomes very popular. What could go wrong? The world needs more empathy, right?
Walpert's novel does not allow a naïve answer to that question. Exploring the limits of empathy as an unmitigated good, he shows that the answer depends on context.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2026/03/05/e...
February 11, 2026
All the reviews I read before picking up Empathy promised an “edge-of-your-seat-thriller”, “a high-energy read”, “a plot pulled skintight”. That’s … not the book I read.
Not that I didn’t enjoy it, but clearly my definition of “thriller” differs from the reviewers’. One even compared the villain to No Country for Old Men. I’m sorry, but we’re not even in the same postcode.
What Walpert does do is write well. His prose flows, the reading experience is genuinely pleasant, and he’s excellent at building empathy for each character. You really do understand where everyone is coming from, which I suspect is the whole point. But we do get a LOT of empathy building.
And therein lies my problem: Walpert spends so much time creating empathy for each character that the thrust of the “thriller” gets left too far in the background. After a punchy, promising start, the story eases right off the accelerator and settles into a long, slow character driven stretch. For me, it became too slow. All the excessive focus on domestic detail smothered the tension I’d been led to anticipate. The corporate crime thriller arc felt rushed and undercooked at the expense of too long spent on the family dynamics.
In the end, this felt more like a thoughtful, cosy, gently handled novel with philosophical leanings than anything resembling a “scared witless thriller.” A good read, yes. But not the high octane ride the marketing (and early reviews) had me braced for. The very definition of “goes down well with a cup of tea and a biscuit”.
Not that I didn’t enjoy it, but clearly my definition of “thriller” differs from the reviewers’. One even compared the villain to No Country for Old Men. I’m sorry, but we’re not even in the same postcode.
What Walpert does do is write well. His prose flows, the reading experience is genuinely pleasant, and he’s excellent at building empathy for each character. You really do understand where everyone is coming from, which I suspect is the whole point. But we do get a LOT of empathy building.
And therein lies my problem: Walpert spends so much time creating empathy for each character that the thrust of the “thriller” gets left too far in the background. After a punchy, promising start, the story eases right off the accelerator and settles into a long, slow character driven stretch. For me, it became too slow. All the excessive focus on domestic detail smothered the tension I’d been led to anticipate. The corporate crime thriller arc felt rushed and undercooked at the expense of too long spent on the family dynamics.
In the end, this felt more like a thoughtful, cosy, gently handled novel with philosophical leanings than anything resembling a “scared witless thriller.” A good read, yes. But not the high octane ride the marketing (and early reviews) had me braced for. The very definition of “goes down well with a cup of tea and a biscuit”.
May 26, 2026
An interesting plot. I enjoyed the dual storytelling- the concept of the online game played by David in contrast to reality.
We all wish for a kinder more empathetic world. This novel poses the question about what would happen if empathy could be bottled. Sounds great, but in a world which has lost its compass and people seek power and control, empathy could become the ultimate manipulative tool.
One aspect that I found a little jarring was the constant backstory injected into the paragraphs. Things we needed to know, backstory that certainly gave insight into the characters but was a very obvious technique.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed this novel and definitely want to read Entanglement.
We all wish for a kinder more empathetic world. This novel poses the question about what would happen if empathy could be bottled. Sounds great, but in a world which has lost its compass and people seek power and control, empathy could become the ultimate manipulative tool.
One aspect that I found a little jarring was the constant backstory injected into the paragraphs. Things we needed to know, backstory that certainly gave insight into the characters but was a very obvious technique.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed this novel and definitely want to read Entanglement.
February 28, 2026
This book didn’t know what it wanted to be. It started off ok and he builds some of the characters well but then the story just slowed down and became disjointed. The not so subtle EmPath gameplay alluding God and the floods was very weird and the ending was so unfulfilling.
In the end, for me, it promised so much and delivered very little. A thriller, not so much.
In the end, for me, it promised so much and delivered very little. A thriller, not so much.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 21, 2026
I was excited for the interesting idea behind the story but was underwhelmed by the actual output. It became a thriller around 170 pages in which felt like quite a commitment. Competently written but without the panache I’m seeking.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews