Beyond the fold

Beyond the Fold by A. J. Mercer

The crops are dying. The dust is rising. And someone — or something — is sending Earth a way out.

When former test pilot Caleb Merritt discovers that a gravitational anomaly buried beneath his equipment shed floor is a data packet from beyond the stars, he is pulled into a desperate secret mission: thread a ship through a wormhole at the edge of the solar system and find a world that can save what remains of humanity.

He leaves behind two children — Sam, fifteen, and Elara, ten — with a promise that will take the rest of her life to understand.

Elara grows up fast. Gifted, stubborn, and fuelled by a grief she refuses to let become an ending, she turns her childhood telescope toward the sky and her mind toward the physics that took her father away. As the years stretch into decades on Earth — while only months pass for Caleb on the other side of the Seam — she realises the mission's most critical variable may be the one only she can solve.

Beyond the Fold is a sweeping, deeply human science fiction novel about the cost of sacrifice and the mathematics of love — about what it means to leave, to wait, and to come home to a world that has had to learn to live without you.

For readers of Interstellar, The Martian, and Station Eleven — a story about the distances between people that no equation can fully measure, and the stubborn refusal to stop working on the ones that might.