Lightbreakers

‘Audaciously tackles life’s most formative experiences: love and loss’ RUMAAN ALAM, New York Times bestselling author of Leave the World Behind

‘Like walking down a hall of mirrors . . . Lightbreakers made me see things anew’ LING MA, prize-winning author of Severance

‘You will love this genre-busting book . . . A cross of literary fiction and sci-fi, it’s also a beautiful meditation of grief, time, and love’ SAMIN NOSTRAT, bestselling author of Salt Fat Acid Heat

Maya, an artist, and Noah, a quantum physicist, are happily married. But beneath the surface of their wedded bliss is a third rail: Serena, the lost child that Noah had with his ex-wife.

When Noah gets a call from an eccentric billionaire asking him to participate in a clandestine project aiming to unravel the secrets of time and consciousness, the couple agrees to relocate to the Janus Lab, deep in the desert, and Noah finds himself drawn into a dangerous kind of time travel that could result in seeing Serena again.

But Janus lab is not what it seems, and soon Noah and Maya are drawn into its dangerous web, where they must grapple with their pasts and plumb the depths of human connection to find their way back to one another.

‘Compassionate and prismatic . . . my favourite kind of novel’ CHLOE BENJAMIN, New York Times bestselling author of The Immortalists

‘Both gripping and deeply felt, as breath-taking as it is mind-bending . . . it exists in a category all its own’ RACHEL KHONG, New York Times bestselling author of Real Americans

Author Biography

Aja Gabel is the author of The Ensemble, and her forthcoming novel Lightbreakers will be released in November 2025. Her prose can be found in The Cut, LA Times, Buzzfeed, BOMB, and elsewhere. She studied writing at Wesleyan University and the University of Virginia, and has a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. Aja has been the recipient of awards from Inprint, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her short story “Little Fish” was adapted into a feature film, and she is developing several screenwriting projects in TV and film. She currently lives and writes in Los Angeles.