THE AVIAN HOURGLASS

Buses drive themselves, birds have disappeared, and you can’t see the stars: This spare and striking novel is what comes next.

“The Conglomerates conglomerate until all corporations become, essentially, one. The bus with no driver keeps making its loop, and the road that goes nowhere dead ends.” The faceless, soulless rhythms of an increasingly automated world shape our unnamed narrator’s daily existence, after she’s informed that the bus she drove down Route 0 can now drive itself. She has lived in the same small town her whole life, and she’s cobbled together an eccentric family: her neighbor Uri; her dead father’s twin, Luce; the triplets she carried as a surrogate and kept after the intended parents died. This life isn’t exactly what she had hoped for. She’s had many dreams: to run away from town with “The Only Person [She’s] Ever Loved,” to become a radio astronomer, to hear the skylarks again, to see the stars. But the birds disappeared a long time ago, and the sky has been blank for just as long. This is the town’s new normal as it barrels toward The Crisis, which could be one thing, or “a series of crises, a web of crises different for every single person on this Earth.” But now, a series of strange occurrences may alter the town’s rhythms forever: Our narrator’s déjà vu is getting worse, making her feel as if she’s lived entire days before; jobs are disappearing as fast as strange nests are popping up; The Demonstration, a protest between YES and NO that has been going on for as long as anyone can remember, adds a new chant; a strange legend about the town—that it was mapped onto the solar system—leads the entire populace on a hunt for the truth. After she learns her late father’s theories on reality, our narrator is left to question the only world she’s ever known. What if she reversed the bus route she’s always driven? What if she went past the road’s dead end? What if she found a way to see the stars?

A speculative novel told in fragments peels back the surface of a small town’s reality.