The Kikiloa Chronicles

"An engaging time-travel romp that mashes up Jung and Doctor Who to masterful effect." OUR VERDICT: ✓ GET IT — Kirkus Reviews

"Sharp prose, warm characterization, and the literary chops to make the heady ideas resonate at a human level." ⚡ Editor's Pick — BookLife Reviews by Publishers Weekly

Kikiloa, the puckish and imperfect time-surfing Mother of humanity, takes us on an award-winning kaleidoscopic adventure of hope, loneliness, and self-discovery. Reviewers agree: it's a "wildly original" novel "unlike anything else" they've read, with philosophical literary storytelling that "offers a rich and rewarding experience."

Kiki is both the 200,000-year-old Mitochondrial Eve and a freckled fourteen-year-old trickster bounding across a San Francisco park to meet her ordinary friend Hazel, who Kiki believes can make death itself pass people by. Probably.

As she flickers across a trillion universes, Kiki is determined to discover an antidote to entropy before everything meaningful is lost. And she hopes Hazel is the key.

When a cliff collapses beneath them and Kiki vanishes mid-fall, Hazel is left facing the man who attacked them, while Kiki's braided hopes unravel backward through self-delusion, all the way to her bleak first life as an outcast enslaved in a dystopian prehistoric world.

But Kiki never lets up. She laments a Hawaiian tsunami, alchemizes sniper attacks, tells quantum stories, weaves through highway pileups, goes Jungian, and bakes perfectly average cookies. And through it all, she spars with her infuriating, enigmatic mentor Paha, who believes surfing is elegy: all waves break, and fighting the end only creates suffering.

The Kikiloa Chronicles is Erik D. Larson's emotionally vast, funny, and wild literary debut carried by Kiki's unmistakable voice - from the devastating loneliness of her first life to the hard-won wisdom of friendship. Charming and self-deceiving, she wrestles with love, a force like gravity, alive at the core of a universe destined for darkness.

Circe meets Douglas Adams in the spirit of Ursula K. Le Guin. Foreword Clarion 5 out of 5, Literary Titan Gold Book Award, 2× American Fiction Awards Winner.

Read Book One of Kikiloa's trilogy with your eyes, mind, and heart wide-open.

Content Note: This story contains scenes of natural disasters with loss of life, gun violence with young teens in danger, and sexual oppression in a dystopian prehistoric setting. The scenes are not graphic, but readers sensitive to these themes may wish to know in advance. While there are teenage characters and strong adventure plotting, this is a complex, unusual, character-driven literary novel for adults and mature teen readers ready for it.