How the two books read

There are two Perpetūra books now, with five stories between them, so it seems worth saying how they fit together and where you can start.

Book One, The Ones Before, holds three stories: Hyunjae in Joseon Korea, Reine in Belle Époque Paris, and Liuyan on the Tang Dynasty Silk Road. Each of them is whole. They share a cover, and nothing in any one of them depends on the other two. You can read Reine first, or only Liuyan, and you will not have missed a step. If you do read all three, you may notice something the three women carry that none of them has a word for. That is on purpose, and it is as far as the first book goes.

Book Two, The Origin, works the same way at its own scale. You can open it without having read the first book and it will make complete sense. Inside it, though, the two stories are joined. They were written to answer each other, and they read best in the order the book gives them.

The second of those is the fifth story, and by the end of it you start to see how all five fit together. I am going to leave it there. It is the one place in the whole thing where being told first would cost you something.

What a book cannot give you is the choosing. Each one follows a single path through each woman's life, the path I picked to set down in ink, and I wrote about why in The book can only hold one. The other paths are all still there in the interactive novel: other choices, other people she comes to know, other endings. In every story, one of them is the path where she chooses no one but herself, and it was written with the same care as the rest.

The interactive novel is free to read in the browser at perpetura.lacunaedesigns.com. If you finished one of the books and wondered what she would have done had she turned the other way, that is where to find out.