THE THURLOW FAMILY HAS BEEN HAVING STRANGE EXPERIENCES.

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In Los Angeles, Tom Thurlow is haunted by a recurring nightmare that begins to intrude into his waking life during a frantic week of deadlines at his marketing job. His brother Peter sees a strange man when he looks in the mirror. Their parents, Helen and Thomas, discover an abandoned estate on a mountain near their home.

 

Once owned by the famous Tawaney family, the estate’s sprawling, secluded house seems to open portals to ghosts and changing timelines. After Helen is nearly lured through a spatial rupture there, she discovers a further Tawaney connection: an old university classmate is now head of the prestigious Tawaney Institute at their alma mater, Edgestow University in England.

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Their experiences attract the attention of Edgestow, where another, more secretive drama is unfolding. The Tawaney Institute has discovered the key to extending human life. There is only one problem: the longer its subjects live, the more their minds begin to unravel.

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The Institute begins searching its alumni records for something science has yet to manufacture: a consciousness capable of surviving an unnaturally prolonged human lifespan. Certain families appear to possess the answer.

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The Thurlows are among them.

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As scientific research, hidden histories and seemingly supernatural events converge, Ink of the Palimpsest uncovers traces of the divine events first glimpsed in Isis Chrysalis. A novel about death as a threshold between worlds, it asks what might happen if humanity succeeds in defeating death in purely physical terms, without understanding what death actually is.

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Ink of the Palimpsest is my answer to C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, in which I reimagine questions of scientific ambition, institutional power and the boundaries of human life in the twenty-first century.​​