Coldwake

A great deep wound slashed across her back from shoulder to thigh - a wound that Timoth could not understand... When he looked past the agony and the deadness, he saw that this woman was not a stranger after all.

When frontier teens Timoth and Martoth stumble upon a mysterious corpse, their search for answers leads them from their rural backwater into a world still reeling from the loss of Earth.

As Martoth grapples with her emerging links to the enigmatic and powerful Vigil, will Timoth's growing awareness of his strange powers expand their world or put everyone they know in danger?

They must find allies in a labyrinth of psychics, zealots and dissidents, and face zombie-like foes and a reality-warping chaos that threatens to wreck the world they're entering even as they discover it.

Set in a mesmerising future of visions, disembodied minds, possession and higher planes of existence, Coldwake interweaves glimpses from 1930s Switzerland with the struggles of a post-Earth humanity, and suggests that the universe has never been quite what we thought.

Inspired by the likes of Julian May's Pliocene Exiles and M. John Harrison's Kefahuchi Tract, indulging in the frontier spirit of Firefly and the timeless mysticism of Star Wars, Coldwake isn't ultimately like any of them. But if you enjoy that sort of thing, maybe you should embark on this odyssey across time, space, and the human spirit.