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The Gilded Ruin
Paperback
FantasyScience FictionGeneral Fiction
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ISBN13: 9798258701268
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Apr 24 2026
Pages: 242
Weight: 0.63
Height: 0.55 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Apr 24 2026
Pages: 242
Weight: 0.63
Height: 0.55 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
A woman begins to notice what her perfect world has been covering. In a city where nothing goes wrong, Mara counsels couples through amicable separations and widows through measured grief. Her clients' feelings arrive correctly calibrated; her sessions close on time; her notes fit the templates. Then a man sits at her desk and tells her his marriage has ended with no charge at all, and she writes one word on her pad - Again - that she cannot remember having written before. The leaves in the square are too evenly arranged. The exhibition at the Sable Gallery contains a fourteenth-century portrait of a woman who is not quite Mara and not quite not. A figure at the edge of her vision watches without interrupting. Somewhere in a narrow dark-stone building on Crane Street, someone has been waiting centuries for the version of her that would stay. The Gilded Ruin is Book One of a literary speculative trilogy about the cost of being real in a world designed to erase feeling. For readers of Susanna Clarke's Piranesi, V. E. Schwab's The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun, and Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone's This Is How You Lose the Time War.
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