"A breathtaking meditation on love, loss, and the multiverse of memory."
In Lightbreakers, Aja Gabel takes readers on a slow, shimmering journey through love, time, and the choices that define us. At its centre are Maya, the artist and Noah, the physicist. In the beginning, there was happiness. She remembers the first time she met him, giving a student talk on a Japanese photographer. He crept into her life quietly, brilliantly, and she thought he was fixable. She thought love might heal him.
But beneath his charm and intellect lay sadness. Pure sadness. A lost child. A first marriage. He’s haunted by his loss. Time is unable to erase it. When a mysterious offer arrives from a billionaire philosopher to join a lab in the Texan desert working on The Janus Project, Noah says yes. The novel begins to crack open, bending light and memory to explore impossible possibilities: what if we could move through time?
Gabel writes with exquisite tenderness about grief and the quiet wreckage of relationships. The heartbreaking losses.
As the narrative shifts, we meet Eileen, Noah’s first wife, and the story deepens. We see the loss. Magnified. Of what could have been. Of what still is.
Through this and Maya’s journey back to Japan - and to Ren, her first love, her old flame - we feel the ache of what might have been. We feel the art of letting go, and the pull of the lives we might have lived. It’s a novel of sliding doors, tethered souls, and the jigsaw puzzle of selfhood.
Lightbreakers asks: can we repair past losses, or only learn to live with them? Gabel answers with emotional precision and scientific wonder. With art. With science. This is a story of impossible things made possible, of love that transcends time, and of grief. Oh such grief.
By the final pages, I found myself sobbing. Undone.
This is a novel that will make you feel. Feel deeply, devastatingly, beautifully about the people who shape us and the choices we make. It’s absolutely stunning.
| Primary Genre | Science Fiction |
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In the beginning, there was happiness. Maya, an artist obsessed with the nature of beauty, and Noah, a quantum physicist preoccupied by the mysteries of the universe, found in each other a shared curiosity about the world. But beneath the surface of their happy marriage is a third rail: Serena, the lost child that Noah had with his ex-wife Eileen.
One day Noah gets a call from an eccentric billionaire, asking him to participate in a clandestine project aiming to unravel the secrets of time and consciousness. The couple agrees to relocate to the Janus Lab, deep in the desert, where Noah finds himself drawn into a dangerous kind of time travel that could result in seeing Serena again.
As Noah delves into this groundbreaking, fringe work, his past begins to overtake him. And when his ex-wife Eileen joins the project, Maya embarks on a journey back to her own past, one that takes her to Japan, to her family, and to a formative lover who once shattered her heart. As Noah, Maya, and Eileen grapple with the balance between holding on and letting go, new information emerges that the Janus Lab might not be exactly what it seems.
Lightbreakers features in the following genres: Sci-Fi / Fantasy Pick of the Month, General Fiction, Science Fiction, Speculative fiction
Lightbreakers is available in Paperback, Hardback
Lightbreakers was written by Aja Gabel and published by Fleet an imprint of Little, Brown
Lightbreakers has 352 pages
£15.29
