The Books
My latest work, so far.
They are companion volumes, written in the same voice, set in the same restrained design, both concerned with what it takes to remain attentive and recognisably human inside an age engineered against attention. Neither is a self-help book. Neither promises transformation. Both offer something smaller, a vocabulary for what is happening to us, and a practice no larger than putting the phone down before the next person finishes their sentence.
The first is called Where Are You, Aurelius?
It is a reading of Marcus Aurelius, not as a brand or a productivity figure, but as a practitioner of disciplined attention, writing to himself in the evenings while running an empire he could not save. The book asks what becomes available, daily, to someone willing to do the same work in their own life, in conditions designed to make that work nearly impossible. It is short, restrained, and ends without resolving, which is the only honest way a book like this can end.
The second is called The Idea of Each Other.
It is a walk through the four loves the Greeks named, and a fifth that has, in our age, quietly eaten the others. It argues that we do not love each other, exactly. We love the idea of each other. We fall for the projection in romantic life and resent the human for not matching it. We mistake the audience for the community in friendship. We love the parent we constructed in our heads and let the actual one die with parts of them we never met. We perform concern for distant strangers while the people in our kitchens wait, unanswered. The book is a diagnosis of the gap, and a small available practice of meeting the real people in your actual life, today, on a Tuesday, before the next chance is also missed.
Available on Amazon, Apple Books, Google Books and Kobo.
There may be a third book at some point. There is no particular plan for it. The publication continues either way.
If you read either book and it lands, an honest review on the store you bought it from helps it find more readers. That is the only ask on this page.
A. Kade