The Eternal Mother: A Novel

A door between worlds. A gift with no price. A reason nobody ever asked.Patrick Halloway wins the Nobel Prize at thirty-five for proving that travel between universes is possible, and feels nothing at all.Then a billionaire offers him an island, unlimited money, and the machine his equations describe - and Patrick opens a door onto a world of impossible abundance. Rare earths at the surface. Oceans of fresh water. An Eden with no owner, no government, and no animals of any kind.The first shipment triggers an earthquake that kills twenty-two people and leaves him stranded.And beneath the ruined camp he finds a black gate he has been dreaming about for a year, a voice that knows his name, and something that takes his dead mother's face because it has read him to the bottom.It is not a place. It is alive. It is very old.And eleven civilisations have stood exactly where he is standing - the last of them ten million years ago.