Kikiloa is Mitochondrial Eve, the 200,000-year-old mother of humanity and our lyrical first storyteller.

As a time surfer flickering across a trillion universes, she’s determined to discover an antidote to entropy before all meaning is lost.

And now she’s a freckled fourteen-year-old trickster bounding across a San Francisco park to meet her kind, grounded friend Hazel, who Kiki believes can cause even death to pass people by. Probably.

When a cliff collapses beneath them and Kiki vanishes mid-fall, Hazel is left alone with their attacker to begin her own coming-of-age, while Kiki’s hopes unravel back to the trauma of her bleak beginnings as outcast and slave in a dying prehistoric world.

But Kiki never lets up, whether lamenting a Hawaiian tsunami, alchemizing sniper attacks, weaving through highway pileups, going Jungian, or baking perfectly average cookies. And throughout, she spars with her infuriating, enigmatic mentor Paha, who believes surfing is elegy: all waves break, and fighting the end only creates suffering.

The Kikiloa Chronicles is Erik D. Larson’s vast, tender, and philosophically ambitious debut, carried by Kiki’s unmistakable voice from the devastating loneliness of her first life to the hard wisdom of friendship. Hopeful and imperfect, she wrestles with love — a force like gravity, alive at the core of a universe destined for darkness.

Cloud Atlas meets The Midnight Library by way of Ursula K. Le Guin.