The Paper Leviathan
Description
Seventeen-year-old Mara survives her capital city's oppressive caste system by copying texts in her father's scriptorium. But Mara has a dangerous habit of noticing the patterns that others ignore. When she discovers that someone has spent the last six years surgically removing specific, highly technical pages from rare arcane texts passing through her shop, she realizes her home has been used as a pipeline for stolen magic.
Unable to reconstruct the missing pages locally, Mara and her sharp-witted best friend, Amilia, travel to Vellumspire?a massive, canyon-carved library-city where the intact original books are held. But Vellumspire's knowledge is gated by wealth and patronage. To bypass its elite gatekeepers, Mara is forced into an uneasy alliance with Warden Corin, a rigid institutional enforcer who is secretly tracking the same conspiracy.
As Mara maps the stolen knowledge and battles bureaucratic sabotage, she uncovers a terrifying truth: the thieves aren't just hoarding spells. They are assembling a machine capable of unraveling the kingdom's entire magical architecture by targeting the royal graves that anchor it. But when the conspiracy's leader confronts her with the reality that destroying the system might be the only way to free its oppressed people, Mara must choose between protecting a corrupt institution that despises her, or letting a death-bound machine tear her world apart.
More details
Person
DAVID EDWARDS is the pen name of Dr. Naushaad Gasieta, a neuropsychologist and independent scholar from Suriname.
He began writing at the age of eight, first out of instinct, then out of stubbornness, and eventually out of the quiet conviction that stories are one way of thinking through memory, power, history, and the worlds people inherit.
The Paper Leviathan was first written in 2014 and completed in an earlier form in 2017. After years of revision, the current version was finalized in 2019. Following an unsuccessful querying process, the novel was published independently in April 2026.
His fiction is shaped by his interest in philosophy, institutions, hidden histories, knowledge systems, and the fragile inner lives of people who begin noticing the machinery beneath ordinary things.
He lives with his wife and their four cats: Moti, a ginger philosopher; Miesje, a black tuxedo menace; Julian, gray-striped and perpetually seeking attention; and Bolle, another ginger, round in both shape and spirit. Much like Mara, he has come to accept that his wife possesses an almost supernatural ability to attract strays.
He is currently working on his long-gestating epic fantasy series, Lamentations, which he hopes to publish in 2027.
