Independent worlds

Standalone books

The first three titles below are published. Explore the other independent worlds in development further down the page.

The Birds Who Hold Up the Sky front cover
Published · Psychological thriller

The Birds Who Hold Up the Sky

Owen Lark is losing words and time. His wife Elise records the changes, while their daughter watches for the person who comes home. The birds on the wires may know more than either of them.

Marriage, memory, care and control.

Book details →

Paperback at Readings ↗

What Remains of Us front cover
Published · Speculative collection

What Remains of Us

Archive 39 holds nineteen and a half surviving accounts from a future shaped by humanity's attempts to make life safer and easier. Each solution works. Each leaves something behind.

Technology, institutions, memory and what remains human.

Paperback at Readings ↗
Before Regret front cover
Published · Psychological thriller

Before Regret

Adrian Pell remembers murdering his wife. She is still alive. Detective Elise Carr follows a neuroscience programme whose subjects remember the emotional consequences of choices before making them.

Memory, responsibility and the cost of knowing what comes next.

eBook at Bookshop.org ↗
The Reader Who Wasn’t There front cover
Meta-horror

The Reader Who Wasn’t There

A novel in five parts about a reader who may be absent, invented or already inside the story. The book turns narration into evidence and reading into participation, hiding a message across sixty-two chapters for the person it insists is not present.

Authorship, absence, complicity, hidden messages and the unstable boundary between book and reader.

Concept cover artwork for The Minds Between
In developmentThe Minds BetweenElias H. Markwath
Psychological speculative fiction · concept cover

The Minds Between

What begins as a problem of privacy becomes a question of geography. If two minds can touch, the space between them may not be empty—and it may develop needs, borders and memories that belong to neither person.

Privacy, connection, consent, shared consciousness and emergent identity.

Concept cover artwork for The Place Between Answers
In developmentThe Place Between AnswersElias H. Markwath
Speculative mystery · concept cover

The Place Between Answers

An immersive journey through inner and outer spaces where certainty fractures. Thought, feeling and physical landscape begin reflecting one another until the search for an answer becomes inseparable from the person asking.

Uncertainty, interiority, perception, emotional landscape and the danger of resolution.

Concept cover artwork for A Mind With No Outside
In developmentA Mind With No OutsideElias H. Markwath
Labyrinth horror · concept cover

A Mind With No Outside

Fourteen regions form a labyrinth that behaves like a complete world: the First Room, the Red Door and environments that test memory as much as direction. Gatherers, Surveyors, Sweepers and the Stitcher each serve a different purpose within its living architecture.

Containment, memory, impossible architecture, pursuit and the difference between searching and escaping.

Concept cover artwork for The Many-Hearted Dead
In developmentThe Many-Hearted DeadElias H. Markwath
Branching dark fantasy · concept cover

The Many-Hearted Dead

A physically ambitious novel of divergent routes, recurring evidence and endings that change according to what the reader follows. Heart, Feather, Egg and Eye are not cosmetic choices; each route interrogates a different mechanism of truth, memory and death.

Divergence, testimony, bodily evidence, unreliable structure and many forms of the same death.

Concept cover artwork for The Sun Pathogen
Working titleThe Sun PathogenElias H. Markwath
Alien science-fiction horror · concept cover

The Sun Pathogen

A banished, difficult protagonist encounters an alien threat that makes translation both survival tool and source of dangerous misunderstanding. The story brings humour into collision with body horror without allowing either to neutralise the other.

Exile, translation, infection, alien biology and humour under pressure.