False Azure, A Novel

Genre: Literary Fiction, Upmarket

Approximate Word Count: 50,000

In False Azure, a lonely wanderer with a fractured but fiercely searching consciousness sets out to make himself useful in the world. In a series of grand but elusive endeavors, he strives for fulfillment. Commonplace is gradually replaced by the fantastic and the absurd. He saves a factory from destruction with deft tool skills. He builds a great wine enterprise with unique marketing and in battle wins victory over the regal goat’s barnyard tyranny. With the professor, he invents the happiness meter, which accurately measures human joy and sorrow. Through thankless toil, he rises through the ranks of the working man’s struggle, only to be overwhelmed by invading dinosaurs. In the circus big top, he reveals new realities for a yearning public. Finally, he is called to build the great edifice in the desert that will unite the scattered tribes. Surely this will bring the glory to which he is entitled. Each achievement is filtered through a narration that may be visionary, comic, self-deceiving, or all three, leaving the reader to ask whether he is a hero of human perseverance or a man inventing meaning against the evidence of his life.

False Azure might appeal to readers of Maria Stepanova’s Disappearing Act, Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman, Hilary Leichter’s Temporary, and Andrey Kurkov’s Death and the Penguin: novels where absurdity, estrangement, and unstable narration reveal a deep existential unease.

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