Literary fiction · 10 books

The Descent

One life, examined ten times, through ten different instruments of knowing.

The premise

Helen, a research director in epistemology in the Scottish borders, seen through ten successive instruments. The books contract as the series deepens, from ninety thousand words down to thirty. The thread is the care, which the other instrument renamed the love.

Readers of ambitious literary sequence fiction who will follow one consciousness for six hundred thousand words.

Reading order

Start at one. They build.

Dr. Gnana Prakash Neel
The author

Dr. Gnana Prakash Neel

A physician by training and a writer by compulsion, working at the seam between clinical neuroscience and the Indian contemplative traditions, two systems that have been describing the same interior events in different vocabularies for a very long time. The non-fiction decomposes; the fiction escalates. Both are, underneath, the same habit of looking for the system that would make everything else make sense.