The writer who goes by Jules’ debut opens with a simple declaration: “Magic isn’t real, except when it is.” From that first line, the book signals what kind of story you’re getting into, one where the boundary between reality and something else is permeable, unstable, and impossible to trust. This is a novel that can feel pretty random and definitely refuses easy categorization or comfortable reading, but should be praised for its daring plot.
As far as I could tell (and the story is quite confusing), the novel basically follows Arc, a one-man musician performing elaborate live-looping shows. What Arc doesn’t talk about openly is his past. His family comes from Nemistis, a magical world where gods are real and causality doesn’t work the same. He was born into service to Tehr, a goddess who doesn’t demand worship through prayer or devotion; she simply uses people as instruments to manipulate the future. “Tehr made her chosen into a puppet, not a prophet,” the book tells us. Arc is one of her chosen.
Arc’s status quo shatters when a mysterious bottle arrives with no return address. Inside is Nokni, a fae creature imprisoned for years and specifically sent to Arc by someone who couldn’t deliver the message in person. Nokni makes an offer: severing Arc’s ties to his world, to Nemistis, to Tehr herself. But the cost will be everything, his relationships, his memories, his sense of self. Soon, he will be pulled deeper into Alterity, a space between worlds where identity becomes something negotiable, where the only certainty is that he can never go back to who he was.
The characterization strengthens what could have been a purely philosophical exercise. Arc himself is a good main character because he’s not a traditional protagonist, and he doesn’t rise to the occasion or embrace a hero’s journey. He’s someone caught between worlds, unable to trust his own choices, compromised by his past. Other characters—Reason, Merron, Gorm, the Sun God Kris—also feel like interesting additions, even if I slightly longed for more normal, human characters to ground the story.
The book’s greatest asset is its creativity, both in terms of the plot and the writing style. The sentences are constructed with real care, “The smell of flowers mingled with decaying leaves is so dense he can taste it”, “Snap, snap, the sound of broken guitar-strings.” The prose effectively conveys states of consciousness that normal vocabulary can’t capture.
As Arc moves deeper into Alterity and loses his grip on reality, the language becomes increasingly abstract and impressionistic, mirroring his psychological dissolution. This is prose that refuses to simplify unnecessarily. It trusts you to piece together meaning without explanation. It respects your intelligence enough to leave gaps that require interpretation.
The book’s weaknesses are real and worth acknowledging. The book’s density will frustrate readers who simply want to follow a plot. Some people will find the fragmentation intellectually interesting but exhausting to follow. A guide would have been much appreciated.
The prose, for all its beauty, sometimes gets so layered that meaning becomes opaque rather than clear. When you’re reading passages like “Their roots wove the surface of the world together”, or “Reason arranges and rearranges time and space like a strange puzzle-box,” it’s gorgeous, mind-bending language, but it can also feel like the book is prioritizing style over clarity. The structure seems intentional but can be confusing in ways that don’t always serve comprehension.
I also noticed the book has a couple of minor errors and forgets to keep saying “chapter” at chapter 3, showing the book could have used a couple more rounds of editing. Lastly, I do not know if this applies to the finished product, but the the copy of the book I received it also not formatted correctly like a book; it’s just a plain word document.
But these feel like trade-offs rather than failures. The book is bordering on novella-length at at a relatively short 144 words, so is easy to pick up for a short and sweet reading experience. This is a book that respects your intelligence enough not to spoon-feed you meaning, and there are some passages that will have you scratching your head in a good way, “Krakens are native fauna of Alterity. They live on the liminal. They come to the shores of worlds to eat bridges, doorways and other structures. They’d even gulp down an entire language if they can get it.”
What ultimately makes Alterity work is that underneath all the formal experimentation and surreal worldbuilding, there’s a genuinely human story beneath. By the end, you will be slightly wondering what you have just read, but eager to return to it again and to untangle its mysteries. The experience stays with you in ways that more boilerplate stories often don’t.
Final Verdict: For fans of Ted Chiang, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and China Miéville, Alterity is absolutely worth your time. This is a book that won’t explain itself, and it won’t apologise for that. It’s a difficult read, but it’s an interesting and creative one that respects both its material and its readers.
You can get your copy of Alterity here!
