Caught between realities, a mathematician, a book dealer, and a mobster desperately seek a notorious book that disappears upon being read. Only the author, a rakish sci-fi writer, knows whether his popular novel is truthful or a hoax. In a story that is cosmic, inventive, and sly, multi-award-winning author Lavie Tidhar (Central Station) travels from the emergence of life to the very ends of the universe.

“Ingeniously constructed and stylistically protean, this seven-course banquet of a novel glistens with the Golden Age of science fiction, even as it nourishes our neurons with a marvelous thought experiment.”
—James Morrow, award-winning author of Shambling Towards Hiroshima

Delia Welegtabit discovered two things during her childhood on a South Pacific island: her love for mathematics and a novel that isn’t supposed to exist. But the elusive book proves unexpectedly dangerous. Oskar Lens, a science fiction-obsessed mobster in the midst of an existential crisis, will stop at nothing to find the novel. After Delia’s husband Levi goes missing, she seeks help from Daniel Chase, a young, face-blind book dealer.

The infamous novel Lode Stars was written by the infamous Eugene Charles Hartley: legendary pulp science-fiction writer and founder of the Church of the All-Seeing Eyes. In Hartley’s novel, a doppelganger of Delia searches for her missing father in a strange star system. But is any of Lode Stars real? Was Hartley a cynical conman on a quest for wealth and immortality, creating a religion he did not believe in? Or was he a visionary who truly discovered the secrets of the universe?

• Classic science fiction meets Dianetics in this mysterious tale of an author who may have started his own religion; his mathemetician daughter; a reading-obsessed mobster; and a hapless young book dealer


• Lavie Tidhar, who is based in London, has an international audience, and he appears regularly at annual academic and genre conferences in China, Japan, Spain, England, Scotland, and more


• Promotion at major trade and genre conventions, including the World Science Fiction convention; ALA; the Nebula Awards; and Readercon; targeting reviews from mainstream U.S. and British