Beyond the Fall

In a society only a step ahead of ours, the body is a managed system. Pharmanance — the biotech giant that quietly governs daily life — has accustomed the population to its product: flocks of AI nanobots that live inside the brain, correcting, augmenting, optimizing. Imperfection has become a problem with a solution. Ellica Hartte believes in perfectibility. She has built her life on it. As a compliance investigator for Pharmanance, she pursues flawlessness with a precision that has cost her nearly everything — her origins, her relationships, the man she loves. What she doesn't realize is that her obsession has a source older and deeper than ambition: a mother lost too young, a grief that rules her from beneath the surface. When six beta testers die in an undisclosed trial, Ellica is pulled into an investigation that begins to unspool the company's most protected interests — and her own. What she finds at the center is not a malfunction. It is a choice. And the truth will dismantle everything she thought she was. From award-winning author Catherine Wallace Hope, this work of literary dystopia brings together actual emerging science and the primary challenge of our time in a narrative that early readers have called "eerily prescient." In the tradition of Ishiguro, Atwood, and McCarthy, it invites discerning readers to consider the price of power set against the worth of human thought and feeling. Beyond the Fall is a novel about the cost of the drive toward perfection and the value of imperfect humanity.