Alone with You in the Ether: A Love Story (Hardcover)
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?
"Alone With You in the Ether plays with narrative structure and linear time to weave a story of two broken people crashing together like comets, and we, as audience, are witness to their glorious destruction." — Tor.com
“This is a book to savor.” — Publishers Weekly
"The pages fly by in this character-driven novel that is intimate, complicated, and utterly romantic.” — Booklist
"A wonder of a novel.” — B&N Reads
Praise for The Atlas Six:
“If you’re looking for a book you will want to talk about for a long time (and have plenty of people to talk to about it), The Atlas Six is it.” — Buzzfeed
“Blake introduces six of the most devious, talented, and flawed characters to ever find themselves in a magical library, and then sets them against one another in a series of stunning betrayals and reversals.” — Holly Black, New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Night
“Lethally smart. Filled with a cast of brilliantly realized characters, each entangled with one another in torturously delicious ways, The Atlas Six will grip you by the throat and refuse to let go. Olivie Blake is a mind-blowing talent.” — Chloe Gong, author of New York Times bestselling These Violent Delights
“Compelling, entertaining, and addictive.” — T. L. Huchu, author of The Library of The Dead
“This chilling story of ambition and magic will make you question your own morals as you grow to love (and hate) its fascinating, ruthless cast of characters. I utterly devoured this book.” — Amanda Foody, New York Times bestselling author of All of Us Villains