From Olivie Blake, the New York Times bestselling author of The
Atlas Six, comes a literary, intimate study of time, space, and the
nature of love. Alone with You in the Ether explores what it means to
be unwell, and how to face the fractures of yourself and still love as
if you're not broken.
CHICAGO, SOMETIME--
Two people meet in the Art Institute by chance. Prior to their
encounter, he is a doctoral student who manages his destructive thoughts
with compulsive calculations about time travel; she is a bipolar
counterfeit artist, undergoing court-ordered psychotherapy. By the end
of the story, these things will still be true. But this is not a story
about endings.
For Regan, people are predictable and tedious, including and perhaps
especially herself. She copes with the dreariness of existence by living
impulsively, imagining a new, alternate timeline being created in the
wake of every rash decision.
To Aldo, the world feels disturbingly chaotic. He gets through his days
by erecting a wall of routine: a backbeat of rules and formulas that
keep him going. Without them, the entire framework of his existence
would collapse.
For Regan and Aldo, life has been a matter of resigning themselves to
the blueprints of inevitability--until the two meet. Could six
conversations with a stranger be the variable that shakes up the entire
simulation?
