THE WORLD OF DESTINIES

Mankind destroyed itself once with machines. So it outlawed them - and built something far more dangerous.

After the Great Digital War, the survivors closed the Digital Age and began the Mirrors-Light-Breath-Name Period. Everything digital was forbidden. Four disciplines took its place and came to govern all human life: passing through mirrors, the bending of light, of breath, and of names - and with names, of stories and of books. From the two Great Books, the Book of Beauty and the Book of Disorder, mankind drew up the World Agreement, and under its Article-Zero it placed the one substance every living body needs to stay alight: firewater essence.

Centuries on, Council President GokUmran wants Article-Zero struck out. He needs one vote to do it, and the Bey who refuses him rules the small SweetTongue Principality - the land the Essence Ways run through. He will not attack openly. He has quieter instruments: the Great Mirrors, which reach into the mind of anyone who passes through a mirror, and QafSound, which bends the breath of the whole world.

SweetTongue has survived him this long because of the World of Destinies: a simulated world balanced on the head of a pin, in which a single day plays out six months of the future. Inside it live the emselves - small turquoise-eyed likenesses of every living person, each carrying a soul of its own - moved by the Grand Narratives of the Book of Destinies and by the small stories of the story-benders. Watch the emselves, and you see your enemy's next six months before he has lived them.

The instrument is failing. Shadow Mirrors have appeared inside it, and those who pass through come home with monstrous powers. Some emselves have understood that they are puppets, and have found their way out into the Real World. Worst of all, the World of Destinies has begun to predict wrongly - and by the time anyone learns why, it is too late.

Alev is fourteen, the Bey's daughter, and heir to a throne she must first win in a month-long contest against Atike, the finest bender of light and breath in the Principality. She has just met her Silhouette and learned the one thing she never wanted to know: that she is not a god. Her Shadow comes next. Before the season turns she will lose her father and her country, and be handed a burden no girl her age should carry.

All of it reaches us through a single unreliable source: the diary of Edib, a young tracker who was there for most of it, hopelessly in love with a girl who barely looks at him, and who is never quite certain he has told any of it rightly.

The World of Destinies opens a three-volume dystopia of ideas - about knowledge that no longer matches what is real, about the blindness that follows, and about the oldest catastrophe there is: the human being broken into pieces. It is a story of mirrors and masks, of essence and addiction, of fathers and daughters. It is also, quietly and without apology, a book about prayer, surrender, and the difference between knowing a thing and understanding it.

Volume I - The Magical Beginning and the Fall (Fragmentation)

Volume II - Love and Transformation

Volume III - Death and Atonement