DESPAIR
This is a love story.
It just happens to contain a suicide letter in Chapter One, a book that destroys or transforms its readers, a narrator who may be lying, a woman who believes she is in control, and instructions to burn the book if it changes your life.
But yes. It is a love story.
The Premise
Zoe hears about a mysterious novel. Men who read it quit jobs, burn their copies, attempt reinvention, attempt suicide, and hide it in time capsules for their children.
Some burn it because the author told them to: "If this book changes your life for the better, burn it..."
Zoe wants it. She finds it. She reads it. Five hours later she is in the bath, crying, heating the water, crying again. And then the real story begins.
What This Book Actually Is
A novel about authorship and responsibility, seduction and manipulation, ego and performance, how literature enters real life, how readers become participants, and how love destabilizes narrative authority.
The narrator speaks directly to you. He tells you he is untrustworthy. He tells you this might be a mystery novel. He smiles while telling you someone tried to kill themselves. He insists he can "fix it."
He might be the villain. He might be the hero. He might be both.
Tone
Sharp. Self-aware. Literary. Funny in the wrong places. Tender in the wrong places.
It references Nabokov, Pynchon, metafiction, pornography vs God, cultural decay, ego and memory, childhood trauma, and the physics of laughter in bed.
It is layered like brickwork. The narrator says so.
What Makes It Dangerous
The novel contains, inside it, another novel - a book that alters marriages, provokes burning, inspires reinvention, encourages destruction, and asks readers to confront the "sad, smiling, careless voice" inside sentences.
It is recursive. You are reading about a book that changes lives. You are reading that book.
Who This Is For
- Readers who miss when novels were architectural
- People who like unreliable narrators
- Lovers of layered structure
- Anyone who has ever fallen for someone because of a book
- Anyone who suspects literature still matters
If you want comfort, this is not it. If you want to be implicated, continue.
A Final Note
The book opens with Marvell: "My love is of a birth as rare / As 'tis for object strange and high / It was begotten by Despair / Upon Impossibility."
That is not decorative. That is structural.
Why Own the Physical Copy
Because this is a book about holding a book. Because burning requires paper. Because the weight of it matters.
Because if it changes you, you will have a decision to make.
Specs
| Format | A5 (148 × 210 mm) |
| Length | ~174 pages |
| Binding | Perfect bound |
| Cover | Matte laminate |
| License | CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 |
| SKU | DES-A-REV1-A5 |
