Cathedral of Mirrors: A Lucid Romance

Maya Alvarado hasn't slept properly in three days when she collapses face-first onto her tablet and wakes walking barefoot across an ocean suspended beneath a sky full of stars. At the horizon stands Luca - a man who knows her completely, who speaks in the cadence of her grief, who waits for her each time she closes her eyes.What begins as lucid dreaming becomes something more consuming. Haunted by the recent loss of someone she loved and unable to find her footing in waking life, Maya falls deeper into a dream world of impossible beauty: a library where shelves breathe, and books rewrite themselves, a city where glass rain ascends toward a bruised sky, a submerged cathedral housing a door she isn't ready to open. Luca is her guide through all of it - intimate, uncanny, and possessed of a knowledge about her that no dream figure should have.When a neurologist named Dr. Evelyn Hart recruits Maya into an experimental lucid-dream synchronization trial, the boundaries between minds begin to dissolve. A quiet painter named Jonas Vale has been dreaming about Maya's grief before they ever met. The machine meant to connect minds may be doing something far stranger - dissolving the very boundaries that make a self a self. And Luca, assembled from the architecture of loss and longing and the subconscious contributions of multiple minds, begins to come apart at the seams.Cathedral of Mirrors is a novel about what we build to survive the unsurvivable, and what it costs to put it down finally. It asks whether the emotions generated in an impossible place can be real, whether the dead leave something of themselves in the architecture of our grief, and whether choosing the partial and effortful waking world - with all its loss and imperfection and real-person problems - might be the most extraordinary act of love available to us.Lyrical, psychologically intricate, and deeply felt, Cathedral of Mirrors moves through the territory of grief, identity, and the permeability of consciousness to arrive at a quiet and hard-won answer: the echo of something real is not nothing. It is, in fact, enough.

Pages: 433, Paperback, Independently published