There is no God waiting for you in paradise. No afterlife where friendships severed by death are reformed and family members reunited. There is only the Aether. A dimension of insatiable hunger, it will possess you no matter your beliefs or the life you led.

Yet there is hope for a lucky few. Archivists, existing between the world of the living and the world of the dead, can offer salvation... for a price. Taking your essence in the final moments before death, they tether you to the physical world. They become your afterlife, linking you with the living while your body rots.

When a newly-realised 18-year-old Archivist meets wayward teenager, Sun-young Kang, he finds himself the centre of a spate of suicides committed by schoolgirls. Believing himself to be the last born of his kind, the Archivist must come to terms with the reality that there is another archivist nearby. He soon learns of their plan to entrap him and, with the help of Sun-young, must unpick the mystery of the suicides before anyone else dies.

The Archivist is an incredibly rich novel with a truly original concept. It is cinematic in its scope and details the haunting, but also beautiful, gift an archivist could offer a person in their final moments.

Books by V S Nelson