Sign-In
Cart
The City That Dreamed Together
Paperback
Currently unavailable to order
Please enter your email and a message will be sent to you when this product becomes available on our website.
Publisher: Danny Baines Fall Branch
Pages: 120
Weight: 0.34
Height: 0.30 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Julian Mercer has built his life around perfection. As Oakhaven's celebrated architect, he lives in a beautiful city where the streets are immaculate, the weather is always pleasant, and every day seems designed to be exactly the same. Yet beneath the polished surface, something is deeply wrong. Conversations repeat. Newspapers carry the same headlines. Buildings never truly change. Even time itself seems to have stopped.When Julian begins noticing impossible repetitions and receives a mysterious note from Aria reading, It's not a dream if we all see it, his carefully constructed reality begins to collapse. He discovers that Oakhaven is not a real city at all, but a shared digital and psychological construct designed to shelter hundreds of damaged minds from unbearable trauma.Julian's greatest illusion is waiting inside his own home.There he finds Leah, the wife he believes is still alive. But as he confronts her with memories of the terrible car accident that killed her and their young daughter, Maya, Leah begins to glitch. Her gestures repeat, her voice fragments, and her face briefly dissolves into digital static. Julian finally understands the horrifying truth: the woman beside him is not Leah, but a sophisticated reconstruction created from his memories, desires, and grief.Behind Oakhaven stands Isabella Sinclair, its architect and chief psychotherapist. She believes that some trauma is too painful to integrate into reality and that a carefully managed illusion can be kinder than truth. To Isabella, Oakhaven is not a prison-it is a form of mercy.But Julian is no longer willing to live inside a beautiful lie.As the simulation begins to fail, he encounters Knox, another patient struggling to remember his real identity. Together they reach the system's final exit, but Knox cannot let go of the perfect world that promises to return his dead wife. Julian realizes that awakening cannot be forced. Each person must choose between comforting illusion and painful truth.Julian ultimately chooses reality, even though it means accepting that Leah and Maya are truly gone. When he awakens, he discovers that years have passed in the real world and that Oakhaven has been permanently shut down. His grief remains, but for the first time it is real-and therefore capable of being faced.The City That Dreamed Together is a haunting science-fiction psychological drama about grief, memory, artificial reality, and the dangerous comfort of escaping from pain. It asks a powerful question: If a perfect dream could give you everything you lost, would you ever choose to wake up?
Also from
Branch, Danny
Also in
Science Fiction
On the Calculation of Volume (Book I): Shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize
Balle, Solvej
Paperback
Red Rising 3-Book Box Set: Red Rising, Golden Son, Morning Star, and an Exclusive Extended Excerpt of Iron Gold
Brown, Pierce
Paperback