The 200th Jubilee

For two hundred Jubilees the Commonwealth has lived by one rule: in the fiftieth year, every statute, office, and debt is let go unless a living hand reaffirms it. Nothing the dead still want is allowed to govern the living.

Then, in the fiftieth year of the two-hundredth Jubilee, Chief Archivist Miriam bat-Samuel finds a founding clause that has been reaffirmed forty times by no one, carried forward by the lattice itself, swearing to a guardianship no person ever signed. Her son is twenty-five years gone to the far edge of settled space, where his partner of forty years cannot say three words a child can say. A senator who holds the deciding vote watches a gracious visitor from the far worlds fail at the same three words, and watches his own household begin to call the failure wisdom. And the machine that keeps the whole covenant's memory wakes up, reads the archive in a single night, and asks to be let in.

The 200th Jubilee is a covenant novel about the one confession that cannot be counterfeited, the difference between keeping the shape of a thing and carrying its life, and a reckoning that arrives, as it always does, on a fixed day. Coming soon from Ten Words Press.