Three Eight One
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
In January 2314, Rowena Savalas – a curator of the vast archive of the twenty-first century’s primitive internet – stumbles upon a story posted in the summer of 2024. She’s quickly drawn into the mystery of the text: Is it autobiography, fantasy or fraud? What’s the significance of the recurring number 381?
In the story, the protagonist Fairly walks the Horned Road – a quest undertaken by youngsters in her village when they come of age. She is followed by the “breathing man,” a looming presence, dogging her heels every step of the way. Everything she was taught about her world is overturned.
Following Fairly’s quest, Rowena comes to question her own choices, and a predictable life of curation becomes one of exploration, adventure and love. As both women’s stories draw to a close, she realises it doesn’t matter whether the story is true or not: as with the quest itself, it’s the journey that matters.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This genre-bending metafictional narrative from Whitely (Skyward Inn) begins in 2314, when 17-year-old aspiring historian Rowena Savalas, living in the semi-utopian "Age of Curation," stumbles across The Dance of the Horned Road, an electronic "autobiographical document containing elements of fiction" from 2024. In that piece, divided into numerous sections of 381 words each, a young woman named Fairly is chosen to follow "the horned road" as a quester. Throughout the course of her dreamlike, surreal journey, Fairly repeatedly encounters the cha, mysterious creatures whose likenesses serve as quest currency and who act as both companions and foodstuffs. Meanwhile, Rowena's annotations chronicle her questions and comments regarding the text while reflecting her own personal growth. It's an ambitious structure and, with frequent changes in perspective and tense, it can occasionally be challenging to follow. The plot is circuitous and the characters thinly sketched, but Whitely's ear for poetic prose will draw in readers who prefer their speculative fiction on the more literary side. Strange and slippery, this experimental outing offers lots to chew on.
