Aphasia: A Novel – Complete
Katie Lynne knew her future: a year teaching English in Prague, a romantic engagement, a fairy-tale wedding. She just never expected the end of the world. Aphasia, a 75,000 word work of literary post-apocalyptic fiction, follows Katie’s journey as she navigates an altered world, a modern-day Tower of Babel brought about by a global pandemic.
Katie and an unfriendly colleague named Honza spend three months quarantined in the Czech secondary school where Katie once lived and they both once taught. But their precautionary measures fail. The Babel Virus spares their lives, but like all other survivors, they awake with a new and specific form of aphasia: though they can still understand one another, they can no longer speak nor write in their native languages. Only Honza’s lessons in Czech save Katie from the madness of losing English.
Now Katie and Honza must travel through the looted and dangerous city to find Honza’s family and Katie’s fiancé. Though much good still survives beneath the golden spires of Prague, the pair faces German-speaking gangs, a Kazakh mafia boss bent on controlling the city, and a Swiss researcher determined to find a cure no matter the cost. Worst, Katie earns the ire of Luka, the Kazakh’s second-in-command and a merciless killer who will stop at nothing to prevent her from reaching her fiancé. In this new world of violence, and with the wrong man at her side, Katie must discover her identity outside of the English she once spoke and the love she now seeks. If she doesn’t, only silence awaits.