Lightbreakers

(Paperback)

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Description

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.

Reviews

Audaciously tackles life's most formative experiences: love and loss. Lightbreakers explores how people use both science and art to understand the universe-offering us its own insights into what it is to be human * Rumaan Alam, New York Times bestselling author of Entitlement and Leave the World Behind *
Exists in a category all its own: a novel about grief, ambition, and love that is somehow both gripping and deeply felt, as breath-taking as it is mind-bending. Aja Gabel's prose is like music, vivid with wisdom, curiosity, and emotion. This is a book that tenderly examines the limits of our understanding-about the universe and each other-and the strangeness of living in time * Rachel Khong, New York Times bestselling author of Real Americans *
Lightbreakers is compassionate and prismatic, an intellectual adventure as well as a deeply human meditation on memory, family, and reinvention. To what extent-and at what cost-can the past sustain us How can we step into the future without abandoning our previous selves Aja Gabel's second novel is my favorite kind: soulful science fiction that speaks to the mind as well as the heart * Chloe Benjamin, New York Times bestselling author of The Immortalists *

Author Bio

Aja Gabel is the author of The Ensemble, and her forthcoming novel Lightbreakers will be released in November 2025. Her prose can be found in The Cut, LA Times, Buzzfeed, BOMB, and elsewhere. She studied writing at Wesleyan University and the University of Virginia, and has a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. Aja has been the recipient of awards from Inprint, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her short story "Little Fish" was adapted into a feature film, and she is developing several screenwriting projects in TV and film. She currently lives and writes in Los Angeles.