Sarah Wu is one of the finest neurosurgeons alive—a woman who has spent nineteen years standing between strangers and the end of them, and refusing to let it come. She has a husband, four children, and a life built with the same impossible patience she brings to the operating table. Then, in the quiet of a November night, counting the breathing of her sleeping family in the dark, she does not let herself notice that one of the breaths she counts is a breath she cannot actually hear.

When a phenomenon begins to tear at the edges of the known world—surfacing first as ghostly waves in the EEGs of Sarah’s own research—a family flees to a cabin in the mountains, three hundred miles from the widening seam. There, in the cold and the silence, the boundary between what is real and what is remembered grows thin, and Sarah must confront a question larger than any surgery: what, and who, is she truly trying to save?

Told through the intimate lens of one mother and one family, THE FOURTH FOOTPRINT is a work of literary science fiction that makes the cosmic feel personal and the impossible feel like grief. For readers who love immersive, emotionally resonant speculative fiction that lingers long after the final page.

“Beautiful literary science fiction… Wu makes the impossible feel intimate by keeping the rupture close to one family.”—Jamie Michele, Readers’ Favorite (5 Stars)