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?

From Olivie Blake, the New York Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six, comes an intimate and contemporary 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.

Review:

Intricate, passionate, and memorable!

Alone With You in the Ether is an intimate, pensive novel that immerses you into the lives of two unique individuals. Regan, a young bipolar woman and aspiring artist who is struggling to find purpose in her life while dependent on the medication she has been prescribed to take, and Aldo, a doctoral student and exceptional mathematician who spends his days contemplating the concept of time travel and doing whatever he can to quiet a mind that never wants to rest.

The prose is sincere and evocative. The characters are eccentric, multi-layered, and vulnerable. And the plot is a compelling tale of life, love, family, friendship, desires, needs, complex relationships, and mental health.

Overall, Alone With You in the Ether is a unique, emotional, sensitive tale by Blake that does a remarkable job of highlighting the struggles of being able to perform normal daily activities, forge true friendships, and experience love while being neurodivergent and reminds us just how blurry the line can sometimes be between healthy love and that which is too consuming or detrimental.

This book is available now.

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