The Watermark

Young journalist Jaime finally has a promising assignment: interviewing reclusive novelist Augustus Fate about his latest work. Little does Jaime know that Fate has been struggling to make his characters lifelike and has found a new strategy—trapping real people inside his books. Forced inside Fate’s latest novel, Jaime encounters Rachel, his troubled online friend who recently disappeared. In their attempts to escape Fate, Jaime and Rachel jump from novel to novel, but as their relationship and memories shift with each new life, can they find their way back to the real world? Mills crafts a clever metafictional narrative that adeptly moves between genres and styles as it follows Rachel and Jaime all the way from Victorian England to a heavily automated sci-fi future. Their repeating cycle of amnesia, recall, and escape can grow repetitive, but the central thread is Jaime and Rachel’s evolving relationship—a tentative romance between two struggling young people that asks what can be built on the stories everyone tells themselves.