The Ghost of Matter, by Octavia Cade

Description

1886. Two young boys disappear in the Sounds. Their mother grieves, all the music cut out of her heart; their father wanders the coast for a year, wanting and not wanting to find any part of them left behind.

And their brother Ern, faced with a problem to which no solution can be found, returns to his laboratory – and to the smell of salt, soft voices in his ear, wet footprints welling seawater in the darkness.

The Ghost of Matter is a piece of speculative history about the man who split the atom, the silences between, and the grief of broken things.

Winner of the Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best Novella/Novelette