Aja Gabel’s new novel returns again and again to a photograph of a woman standing on the edge. Perhaps she is falling or is about to jump, or she is bringing herself back from the brink of danger. The image is understood by characters in various ways, through differing lenses of art and science, personal experience and analysis. The book itself is at the edge of genres: a domestic drama flirting with sci-fi and speculative fiction. Gabel’s characters interpret moments in their lives and relationships uniquely from each other as they live through them and then revisit them years later.

"The book is beautifully written, and Gabel does a lovely job showing the ways in which the arts and the sciences are in service of the same goals.... LIGHTBREAKERS is a thoughtful, compelling and moving examination of the human instinct for love and meaning-making."

LIGHTBREAKERS follows a married couple, Noah and Maya, as they relocate from California to Marfa, Texas, when Noah takes a job with the Janus Project. Maya is an artist whose career has stalled, so she hopes that this move will jumpstart her productivity and bring new energy to her marriage. Noah is a physicist who mostly works with mathematical models and was hired for Janus, the brainchild of billionaire Klein Michaels, which he believes is based on a flawed academic paper that he wrote many years ago. Like Maya, Noah is hoping for a fresh start and another way to put the past behind him. But it quickly becomes apparent that it is exactly his connection to the past that brought him to Janus. 

Noah’s first marriage, to a young biologist named Eileen, ended after the death of their almost-four-year-old daughter, Serena. It is this tragedy, and Noah’s desire to relive his brief time with Serena, that made him the perfect candidate for Michaels’ work at Janus. The project is really about returning to the past and the human desire to change it. As Noah grows increasingly, and dangerously, obsessed with it, the fault lines in his marriage grow. Maya, too, looks to the past to understand the present and returns to Japan not just to visit her parents, but to reunite with her former partner, Ren, a handsome and successful artist.

In the opening chapters, LIGHTBREAKERS seems to be a book about loss and possibilities, which indeed are central themes. But Gabel takes a story of a marriage, parenthood, grief and love and does something inventive, turning it into a speculative tale about physics, perception, memory, time travel, and the ways we can travel through emotional time. All the while, she explores the power of expression, the limitations and creativity of science, the corruption of great wealth, and the destruction of the natural world.

The narrative moves between the points of view of Noah and Maya, and, later, Eileen. Each wrestles with memory, the details of which are fluid and inconsistent between them, as they move towards a confrontation with the horrors of the Janus Project and a chance to heal from past sorrows and heartaches. The book is beautifully written, and Gabel does a lovely job showing the ways in which the arts and the sciences are in service of the same goals.

Although the pacing is occasionally slow and the action a bit repetitive, LIGHTBREAKERS is a thoughtful, compelling and moving examination of the human instinct for love and meaning-making.