Falling Glass

An old man stops before he can finish signing his name. He is awake and oriented. He answers correctly, walks when instructed and drinks when a glass is held to his lips. What he does not do is begin.

In Varne, a river and harbour city ordered by registers, timetables and long-established civic routines, Julian Vance has spent nineteen years at the Registry checking that paper and the world it records agree. At the Marlowe, physician Elias Thorne works through observation, exact figures and the practical demands of care.

Then people begin to stop. A tram driver stands beside his vehicle through the working afternoon. Others are found standing in passages or sitting where they have been left. Many remain conscious, oriented and capable of movement. They answer when spoken to and act when prompted, but initiate nothing for themselves. No one can explain why.

When Varne's port is closed, the railway cut and the Vear Bridge blocked, the city is isolated. Through autumn and winter, water must be carried and held to mouths, bodies must be turned, and people living alone must be found behind closed doors. Coal runs out. The Registry's ink runs low. Records made for one purpose are pressed into another, and every practical decision exposes the distance between what a document says and what a life requires.

Julian and Elias enter the same crisis through different obligations: one to the integrity of the record, the other to the immediate needs of the living. Around them, clerks, nurses, labourers and neighbours create new routines of care across hospital wards, communal houses and the disused municipal Baths. The mystery remains, but the work cannot wait.

Falling Glass is a restrained literary speculative novel about agency, consent, bureaucracy, grief, endurance and the quiet labour that holds a community together.

Read Falling Glass and enter a city where people do what they are asked, but do not begin.