Paradise, Monthly

In 2103, the heat won.

Outside the glass, the desert air kills in under an hour. Inside Eden — the sealed city built by the generation that watched the world burn — paradise is still possible. You just have to keep paying for it. Because in Eden, even an ordinary life is a luxury: a cool room, clean water, a doctor, a door that locks. To survive normally, you have to be rich.

Air is a subscription. Water is a subscription. Medicine is a subscription. The founders heirs — the Charter — own paradise outright and appear on no price list. Everyone else rents existence tier by tier: Golds private weather, Verdes gardens, Standards honest cool, the Ash, where the poor sleep in 38-degree recycled air and die quietly of "cardiac events." Fall behind and you descend. Fall all the way and youre Null — no plan, no person, no name.

Jonah Ferreira is a cooling mechanic with a mother dying in the Ash, a daughter who has never seen rain, and one asset worth more than his labour: his memories. Edens Exchange buys the past from the poor and sells it to the rich, who relive other peoples childhoods, first loves and wedding days in their salons like vintage wine. The price of his mothers life is the single most valuable thing he owns — the hour his daughter was born.

But that memory carries his grandfathers voice. And what his grandfather says should not exist.

A searing climate parable about who gets to survive the heat — and what the poor must sell so the rich can stay cool — PARADISE, MONTHLY is a standalone novel in the universe of The Second Draft, The Hollow Verdict and Equal to Zero: a story of climate apartheid, corporate paradise, and the last thing the poor still own that the rich still want.