"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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'Audaciously tackles life's most formative experiences: love and loss' RUMAAN ALAM, New York Times bestselling author of Leave the World Behind
'Like walking down a hall of mirrors . . . Lightbreakers made me see things anew' LING MA, prize-winning author of Severance
'You will love this genre-busting book . . . A cross of literary fiction and sci-fi, it's also a beautiful meditation of grief, time, and love' SAMIN NOSTRAT, bestselling author of Salt Fat Acid Heat
Maya, an artist, and Noah, a quantum physicist, are happily married. But beneath the surface of their wedded bliss is a third rail: Serena, the lost child that Noah had with his ex-wife.
When 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, and Noah finds himself drawn into a dangerous kind of time travel that could result in seeing Serena again.
But Janus lab is not what it seems, and soon Noah and Maya are drawn into its dangerous web, where they must grapple with their pasts and plumb the depths of human connection to find their way back to one another.
'Compassionate and prismatic . . . my favourite kind of novel' CHLOE BENJAMIN, New York Times bestselling author of The Immortalists
'Both gripping and deeply felt, as breath-taking as it is mind-bending . . . it exists in a category all its own' RACHEL KHONG, New York Times bestselling author of Real Americans
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
£9.89
