The story of an unusual but increasingly close friendship, this is a totally original and engrossing novel. Ollie and Moritz strike up a friendship through letters. They are far from each other geographically, but could never meet anyway: Ollie has a strange disability which makes him allergic to any form of electricity and Moritz has a pacemaker. Moritz has other disabilities too which have made him pretty much an outcast at school, while in his necessarily remote cabin Ollie has just one person he can call a friend. Not just their strange situations, but their characters come through the letters they write to each other - these are honest, revealing, sometimes heartbreakingly so. It’s impossible not to be caught up in their lives.
Ollie and Moritz are two teenagers who will never meet. Each of them lives with a life-affecting illness. Contact with electricity sends Ollie into debilitating seizures, while Moritz has a heart defect and is kept alive by an electronic pacemaker. If they did meet, Ollie would seize, but turning off the pacemaker would kill Moritz.
Through an exchange of letters, the two boys develop a strong bond of friendship which becomes a lifeline during dark times - until Moritz reveals that he holds the key to their shared, sinister past, and has been keeping it from Ollie all along.
Leah Thomas received her BA in English from Michigan State University, and is a graduate of the Clarion Writers' Workshop. Her work has since appeared in Asimov's, Ideomancer, Futuredaze: An Anthology of YA Science Fiction, Daily Science Fiction and Weird Fiction Review. This is her first novel.
