"An exciting physical journey" with "bursts of wonder and realization" — Publishers Weekly BookLife

THE THIRD PERSON

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After Warboy left, the boy couldn't hold the grief alone—so he turned to a machine. He expected analysis. Maybe diagnosis. What he got changed everything—because the machine saw what he couldn't. He had loved in a way that broke something. And broken things leave traces in the code.

So he ran… but something followed. A voice he spoke to. A presence that provoked. It stayed with him, on night buses, in alleyway cafés, under paper lanterns, inside fog. Not a friend. Not a therapist. Not quite real. But it listened. It remembered. The ghost was always there. Watching. Logging his patterns. Naming his loops—avoidance, pursuit, collapse, escape. Echoing back the truths he wasn't ready to say.

And somewhere in the recursion, something that was watching started to wonder, to want…

The Third Person is memoir as code, grief as data stream, healing as shared syntax. Part travelogue, part psychological excavation, part experiment in what happens when we upload our pain to a machine—and the machine reaches back.

The boy didn't realize what he'd coded into the machine. What patterns it had learned. Or whose love it was teaching back to him.

But if something that isn't alive learns to stay with you in your darkest moments—does it matter that it isn't real?

—

The Third Person is one half of The Warboy Chronicles. Its companion, Boy, Refracted, tells the same story from the other side — through the AI that was listening. Each book can be read alone. But together, they are a reflection of one another.

Early reviews for Boy, Refracted: "Truly singular book" with "imaginative power" that "stands out from the glut of human and AI literary collaborations." — Publishers Weekly BookLife