False Vacuum Hardcover – November 1, 2025

Jakob Schenk, an Oxford physicist, has built a machine that can transfer consciousness between parallel universes. He tells himself it's for science. Really, it's for Christina Hamilton-brilliant, capricious, doomed to die in timeline after timeline no matter what he does to save her. Each jump leaves behind a universe that begins to collapse at the quantum level, reality unravelling as the fundamental constants of physics decay. Ten billion lives are erased every time he pulls the trigger. But Jakob keeps jumping, because somewhere in the infinite parallels there must exist a world where she doesn't die of an aneurysm at thirty-one, doesn't board the plane that crashes, doesn't simply stop loving him for reasons that make perfect sense to everyone but him. What he discovers is worse than her death: the universe seems hardcoded against them. Their separation repeats across realities like a cosmic constant, as immutable as the speed of light. Every timeline offers a new variation on the same theme-love, loss, the inevitable ending. This is a philosophical horror novel dressed as a romance, a recursive tragedy where one man treats infinite realities as rough drafts he can discard. As the body count climbs into the trillions, the question becomes not whether Jakob will find the perfect timeline, but whether destroying universes for love is more or less insane than simply accepting grief. A literary thriller about obsession, quantum physics, and the terrible mathematics of letting go. Read more