The Last Voyage of the EMpress of Smoke

Some passengers were never meant to arrive.

The Empress of Smoke is the greatest of the steam leviathans, a floating city crossing an ocean that may not be an ocean, powered by engines no passenger is permitted to understand. Elias Vale boards her young and grieving, looking for work and a way to outrun his losses. On the first evening he meets Claraelegant, cool-handed, strangeand she asks him a question he will spend the rest of his life unable to answer: Have you ever noticed nobody talks about where the ship goes, after its final port?

Then the passengers begin to disappear. Not violently. They are simply goneno bodies, no blood, no recordand by morning no one else can remember they ever lived. The other passengers whisper of a killer aboard. Elias comes to understand something worse: there is no murderer. There is only a man going through the dark corridors forcing the sleeping to rememberand aboard the Empress, to be remembered is the one sure way to be lost.

As Elias is drawn deeper into Clara’s strange devotion and closer to a truth the ship has spent lifetimes keeping, he is offered the one thing he crossed the world for, by the one man who can give itand told, honestly, what it will cost. The voyage becomes a question with no comfortable answer: whether forgetting is a mercy or the cruelest theft of all, and whether the love that kept him aboard was ever real, or only the most beautiful argument the ship ever made against his waking.

Written as the journal of a man who can no longer be sure of what he is writing, The Last Voyage of the Empress of Smoke is a novel about grief, memory, and the terrible kindness of being allowed to forgeta love story and a haunting that does not end when the book does, but goes quietly on, in the reader, like smoke that rises and does not gather and leaves no stain.