A novel
The Central Sun
A young man who walks the dead home, a princess from a world without death, and two fates that may be tied together.
Book One is in its final edits. Advance copies go out this winter.
The story
Zion is twenty-two, gifted and a little cocky: the crosser his valley trusts to walk its dead down to the far bank. In his city of white plaster and obsidian, everyone can do a little of every craft, from lifting stone with sound to growing a field from a seed. Nobody makes a fuss about it. All Zion wants is the one door his elders won't open.
Far away, on a world of pearl light, nobody dies, nobody lies and nobody feels pain. There, Tara keeps the ceremonies and wants one answer: where her mother went. Each of them is about to receive a warning nobody around them wants to hear.
Funny, adult and unafraid of grief, the book is about death, love and community, and about the old knowledge that still lives in all of us.
Two worlds
Chapters alternate between Zion and Tara. His valley is an ancient city where birth, healing, and death are shared crafts, done in daylight, with care. Her city is three rings of light where the hardest truths have been hidden so long that kindness became a cage. They seem to share nothing. Whether their fates are tied together is for the book to answer.
Nobody in it stands around in awe. A stone block hangs in the air, eleven men swear, and everyone goes back to work.
Lines from the draft
- "You are not cold. You are practiced."
- "That is what permission is. Nobody says yes. Something joins in."
- "Obsidian does not blunt. It only breaks."
- "It's only a river."
- "You do not get good at a thing you have done once."
What it's about underneath
Presence. Grasping for a life beyond the one you're in destroys the one you're in, and waking up here means returning to each other.
Death as a community's work, carried together, in daylight. Grief as the measure of love. A world where the forces of nature run through everyone and nobody needs a priest to reach them. Crafts, not magic, done by people who aren't impressed.
You can read it as a story and lose nothing. You can read it as something else and lose nothing either. It was written to work both ways and never to insist.
Where it comes from
What I practice and study is threaded through it: Chinese medicine, acupuncture, herbalism, bodywork, and the altered states that older cultures treated as trades to be learned. So is what I come from. Irish and Yoruba traditions are folded lightly into a Mesoamerican world alongside many others, to show how alike the old ways were without pretending they were the same.
The book doesn't teach anyone's medicine, and it doesn't sell anyone's culture. It is inspired by and honors ancestral and Indigenous wisdom, credits every tradition it draws on, and asks one thing of a reader: go find what is yours.
Read about ReconnectShenAsk for an advance copy
A small number of advance copies go out this winter to people who'll read it and say what they think. Leave an email and I'll be in touch when they're ready.