Alicia (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798999098023)

Alicia is a literary mystery about control, motherhood, and the hidden fractures in a marriage, brought to the surface when the woman carrying their child vanishes days before giving birth.

Claire and Andrew Cooper have everything: wealth, status, and a pristine Manhattan apartment curated down to the scent. The only thing missing is a child. When IVF fails, Claire proposes an illegal solution: hire their housekeeper, Alicia, as a surrogate. She is quiet, young, and already lives under their roof.

As the pregnancy progresses, Claire tightens her grip, Andrew begins to drift, and Alicia, seemingly compliant, starts to shift in unexpected ways. Then, without warning, she is gone, setting off a search that will expose more than one kind of loss.

With slow-burning suspense and cinematic intensity, Alicia is a character-driven psychological drama about the choices that shape who we become, with echoes of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland reimagined as a descent into a darker adult world.

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

The story was born from a single image: the search for a missing woman, where the true purpose was the child she carried inside her rather than the woman herself. From that seed, the rest grew: the struggle of losing control and learning to live without it; the reality of undocumented immigration; and the desire to reimagine Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in a darker adult world.

I kept wondering: what if Wonderland wasn't fantasy, but today's New York City? What if the story were told from the Queen of Hearts' point of view? At its heart, Alicia is a story about borders: of the body, the law, and the self, and what happens when those borders are crossed.