The Gilded Ruin

By John Moloney

A woman begins to notice what her perfect world has been covering.

In a city where nothing goes wrong, Mara counsels couples through amicable separations and widows through measured grief. Her clients' feelings arrive correctly calibrated; her sessions close on time; her notes fit the templates. Then a man sits at her desk and tells her his marriage has ended with no charge at all, and she writes one word on her pad - Again - that she cannot remember having written before.

The leaves in the square are too evenly arranged. The exhibition at the Sable Gallery contains a fourteenth-century portrait of a woman who is not quite Mara and not quite not. A figure at the edge of her vision watches without interrupting. Somewhere in a narrow dark-stone building on Crane Street, someone has been waiting centuries for the version of her that would stay.

The Gilded Ruin is Book One of a literary speculative trilogy about the cost of being real in a world designed to erase feeling. For readers of Susanna Clarke's Piranesi, V. E. Schwab's The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun, and Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone's This Is How You Lose the Time War.

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GYJNR4DB
• ISBN13: 9798258701268
• Release Date: April 2026
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 241 Pages
• Weight: 0.63 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.6" x 5.5"