The Limits of My World

A PW Booklife Best of 2024 Winner A PW Booklife Editor's Pick A Kirkus Reviews Starred Pick A Foreword INDIES Award Finalist Truth must be a fragile thing if it only survives in one language.

Kanan and Tei live in a universe with carbon walls, small enough that fully grown humans can run around it in seventeen minutes. The earth under their blue-skinned feet is made of silica, and yellow suns glow out of a flat metallic sky. Whatever lies outside their universe is, by definition, Nothing.

Just over their heads, in a place that shouldn't exist, lives an alien race. These creatures also call themselves human, but they have bodies without skin and tongues that speak gibberish. Their alien world is full of things Kanan and Tei are incapable of naming without betraying their own humanity.

When a twist of fate brings these two worlds crashing together, Kanan and Tei find themselves racing unwillingly towards treason: Tei with his mind, Kanan with her legs. As their language grows, so does their universe. But the more they learn about the history of the human race, the more they wonder if they've ever truly been human-or if they even want to be.

Brimming with beauty, mystery, and literary innovation, The Limits of My World daringly confronts the fragility of the words that make us who we are.

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Gregory Coles is the award-winning author of two memoirs and a contributor to Jim Henson's The Dark Crystal Author Quest. He is also an intermittent English professor whose work in rhetorical theory-how language shapes society-has appeared in various academic journals and edited collections, including a collection from Cambridge University Press.