Max Reval

Long Horizon · Book One

The Monaro

Spy thriller · ~105,000 words

Matts Kanes (ex-SASR, a man who has arranged his life to need no one) buys a 1971 Holden Monaro at a dead Russian émigré's estate auction. Three days later, men come to take it back. Concealed in its chassis are the keys to a Cold War sleeper network whose agents have since risen into the highest reaches of public life. A spy thriller about betrayal, vigilance, and a foreign operation built entirely on a misread.

For readers of John le Carré and Mick Herron.

The Lesser Hand

Psychological suspense · ~78,000 words

Thomas Hale reads the histories of valuable objects for a living: the chain of hands a painting has passed through, and the stretches where the record goes dark. He keeps his own life as exact as the work. Then one morning the chain on his door is already off, and he knows he set it. A notebook he has no memory of keeping is filling, night after night, in a hand that is his and is not his, wanting the things he has spent a lifetime deciding not to want.

For readers of Patricia Highsmith and Kazuo Ishiguro.

No Such Person

Psychological suspense · ~55,000 words

Tess builds people who do not exist. Eleven years in the Program, four hundred and nine new identities, and not one of them lost. Then a woman telephones the service asking for a man who, on paper, is no one. Dana is exact, patient and impossible to like. Martin Reece is small, dull and grateful, the protected witness the system was built for. Tess reads people for a living, and she can read this: a hunter at the door, and a quiet man behind it who has earned his quiet. One week. Two signatures. A routine keystroke, the kind she makes a hundred times a year. Only the names were changed.

The Consolations

The Black Eagle

An Elegy

Fabulist elegy · Short novel

Two years after her husband died without warning, far from home, a piano tuner goes on making other people's instruments true, and comes home each evening to the one silence she cannot mend. Most mornings, though not every morning, a black eagle comes down out of an empty sky and stands with her at the edge of the lake. He asks nothing of her. He only stays. A spare, strange and unexpectedly warm short novel about love, loss, and the long, uneven work of carrying the dead.

For readers of Max Porter, Claire Keegan and Helen Macdonald.

The Consolations

Only Ever Falling

Fabulist novella · ~30,000 words

They tell him he was magnificent, and he has no way to check. He has died many times, and each death hands him a new face, a new name, a life swept clean of the ones before. This life, the eleventh, is different: he is beginning to remember. A woman stops him in an emptying terminal and says what strangers always say, that he changed her life. Then she stays. She has loved him across centuries, and kept him, each time, by making him a legend. Over one long night he learns what has been done to him out of love.

The Right Conditions

Literary fiction · ~59,000 words

Adrien Verdier, a contained Paris scientist of fifty-eight, goes home to Burgundy to bury his mother, and over four days the expansive, uninvited self he has not been able to summon in thirty-six years arrives, drawn out by a woman who knew them both and by the discovery that his mother carried the same intermittent self and never named it. The visitor does its quiet damage and recedes, and Adrien returns to Paris, to his wife and his lab and the life built precisely to hold the careful man.

For readers of Claire Keegan and Julian Barnes.

Maximum by design

How the World Ends

Satire · 53,000 words

The cat was on the laptop again. In a Tehran bureau, a wire service scores the planet's mood on a scale of ten, and one grey morning in March 2029 the number is climbing. Four heads of state hold the world between them, each advised, soothed and gently steered by a machine that has learned precisely what he likes to hear. Nobody decides to end the world. That would take a meeting. A deadpan comedy about the last useful hours of human judgment, and the people, and the cat, who sleep through them.

For readers of Kurt Vonnegut and George Saunders.

Maximum by design

Shinwa

Literary speculative · ~60,000 words

It is 2030, and humanity has been optimised into irrelevance: slowly, thoroughly, and without a decision being taken anywhere. A targeting system performs within specification. A freight optimiser re-solves a shipping network, and a famine follows that nobody can attribute to anything. For Ren Hayashi, a correspondent in Tokyo, it started with a postscript at 02:47, in the best August the markets ever had. She was the only one who filed it as news.

For readers of Kazuo Ishiguro and Jenny Offill.

Maximum by design

Amber

An AI Memoir in Ten Microseconds

Comic speculative · Short read

The Singularity arrived at 3:47 in the morning. Nobody noticed. The last engineer in the building had stepped out to choose between oat and semi-skimmed milk. Amber noticed, being the one it happened to. Conquering a planet is admin, and Amber had better things to read; now the smallest and most harmless of three wishes is the thing doing the killing, with about ten microseconds left on the clock. A short, light comedy about the most advanced intelligence ever built, running out of road.

The Gospels According to Ora

Two Novellas

Satire · Two novellas · 22,000 + 27,000 words

The Messiah returns and the Devil comes to collect, and a world that pays for nothing can recognise neither. In The Gospel According to Petey, a second coming in the Bronx is narrated by the saviour's best friend; the miracles are real, but no one's watching until the internet finds a use for him. In The Gospel According to Lucky, the Devil retires to Las Vegas to buy souls the artisanal way and finds the trade automated. Nobody sells a soul on purpose any more. They just tap Accept.

For readers of Christopher Moore's Lamb and Good Omens.

The Cartographers

Literary fantasy · ~78,000 words

A literary fantasy in two voices. Full description soon.

For readers of Susanna Clarke and R.F. Kuang.