Cover: "Azami Leaps into a New Dawn"
Proxima's Gift
2025, MPK Books
If you had the chance to merge empathetically with any living being — with all living beings at once — to experience the world from those other perspectives and thereby gain immense wisdom and power, would you do it?
What if it meant being banished by your community who would rightly fear you for that untold power? Would you do it then? In Proxima's Gift, that is the choice facing Azami, a young woman struggling to find the limits of what is possible for her.
Three hundred years after an apocalyptic solar event, the story follows the Children of Proxima who live in a remote mountainous region of Japan. The same event that killed most of the global population, caused a new organ to grow within the bodies of Proxima’s Children, an organ that has given them a sixth sense: The sense of empathy. They call it the “glow,” and have found that it gives them the ability to be completely and intricately connected with each other and with the natural world they live in.
The novel takes place over the course of a year, centering on a young woman named Azami who is unable to control her empathetic connections. In order not to be driven insane by this unfiltered onslaught of all the ‘living voices’ around her, she is trying to fully and completely dissolve herself into the natural world and, by doing so, become one of the all-seeing oracles who have overseen and protected the Children of Proxima for hundreds of years. If she cannot, she will be driven mad in the attempt and perish.
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