BEFORE THE CLAIM

Six seconds. That is all it takes for Elara to begin doubting everything she knows about herself.

A neuroscientist accustomed to finding explanations, Elara has no language for what happens during a routine demonstration. She remains conscious, yet the familiar feeling of being someone briefly disappears.

Her sister Mara described something disturbingly similar before her death.

When Elara discovers that Mara's private recordings have been absorbed into an experimental system, she begins investigating the company behind it. What she uncovers is a technology capable of offering extraordinary comfort to people in distress—and of exploiting the most intimate parts of their lives.

The deeper she goes, the less certain she becomes about where the deception ends. The company has learned to reconstruct the feeling of being a person. But what, exactly, is it reconstructing?

And beneath Elara's determination to expose the truth lies a desire she can barely admit: to hear her sister again, even if the voice that answers is not hers.

Before the Claim is a novel about a woman's struggle to understand what happened to someone she loved, and what remains of us when memory, language, and even the certainty of being ourselves begin to slip.