Apparently one of the consequences of reading The Ones Before is becoming emotionally invested in hands.

I wish I were joking.

Hands resting. Hands reaching. Hands being watched. Hands revealing something their owners would much rather keep under control.

At some point I realised Lacunae had trained me to notice where somebody’s fingers were sitting on a table and I thought, fantastic. This is my life now.

And that is probably the first thing you need to understand about The Ones Before.

This book works quietly.

It does not stand in front of you screaming LOOK, THIS IS IMPORTANT.

It leaves something small on the page.

A hand. A doorway. A pause. A colour. A silence.

Then something similar appears somewhere else.

You start paying attention.

Then you become suspicious.

Then, apparently, you become me, sitting there mentally connecting fictional objects across centuries with red string and absolutely no adult supervision.

I loved it.

Lacunae writes intimacy in a way I find incredibly difficult to describe because so much of it lives inside what people do not say.

Someone leaves space.

Someone notices a gesture.

Someone understands something without demanding an explanation.

Somebody chooses to look.

Somebody chooses not to.

And those tiny decisions somehow become enormous.

That sentence stayed with me because it contains one of the questions sitting underneath the entire book.

What is the difference between being visible and being known?

They are absolutely not the same thing.

You can be watched constantly and remain completely hidden. You can become extraordinarily good at deciding which version of yourself enters a room. You can make observation, control, beauty, honesty or competence into armour and become so good at wearing it that eventually even you forget there is armour there.

And then another person notices something you forgot to arrange.

That is the kind of emotional territory Lacunae seems obsessed with, and I mean obsessed as the highest compliment.

Her characters are never reduced to neat lessons about vulnerability. Opening a door does not magically make the room safe. Choosing somebody does not erase the cost of the choice. Being understood does not mean surrendering every private room.

Sometimes they make decisions I desperately want to argue with.

One particular woman in this book and I need to have a meeting.

Preferably with snacks.

I have notes.

But that is also why her story affected me so much.

Lacunae understands something fiction occasionally tries to tidy away: you can love what you chose and still grieve what that choice cost you.

Happiness and loss can sit in the same room.

One does not cancel the other.

The prose has its own rhythm too.

Images return. Words return. Physical gestures return. Something that looked almost decorative earlier suddenly carries emotional weight when it appears again.

It feels musical.

And I do not mean “beautiful lyrical prose,” the emergency phrase book reviewers deploy when we have run out of vocabulary.

I mean musical.

Themes return altered. Silence becomes part of the composition. The missing note matters as much as the note that is played.

Most importantly, the book trusts the reader enough to notice.

I never felt Lacunae standing beside me explaining her symbolism. She puts the pieces down and walks away.

You can pick them up or leave them there.

Naturally, I picked up everything.

Now I have questions.

Many questions.

Extremely unreasonable questions involving objects, memory, repetition, unfinished things and, obviously, hands.

Yet the question that opened the book remained the most important one.

By the end, I still could not name the feeling.

I think trying too hard to name it might actually be missing the point.

Sometimes recognition comes before understanding.

Sometimes recognition is enough.

And sometimes a book leaves you with a feeling that refuses to turn itself into a neat little sentence for your review.

Rude, honestly.

I ended The Ones Before wanting The Origin immediately, and I was ridiculously lucky because both books had arrived together as early ARC reads.

So I did not have to sit there politely while all those connections crawled around inside my head.

The next book was already waiting for me.

I opened it almost immediately.

Because there was something underneath The Ones Before.

I knew it.

I just had no idea how deep Lacunae had built the foundations.

Lacunae is an artist.

Also, again: the hands.

I am never getting over the hands.

I finished The Ones Before with theories.

I finished The Origin staring at the wall.

So that went well.

I had things to do.

Apparently Lacunae did not care.

The most impressive thing about this book is that it gives you answers without making the questions smaller.

That is incredibly difficult.

Mysteries often lose something once they are explained. The strange thing receives a mechanism. The symbol gets a definition. The reader says, ahhh, okay.

And somewhere in that explanation, a little magic dies.

Lacunae somehow avoids that.

The more I understood, the larger Perpetūra became.

There was a point when I realised details I had carried out of Book One as beautiful, strange little fragments had been doing structural work all along.

That was when I became angry.

Affectionately.

Because excuse me.

You put that there?

You knew I would remember that?

You made me suspicious of that object for a reason?

Fine.

Very funny.

I see you.

That is one of my favourite things a second book can do.

Make me want to return to the first one with different eyes.

And this is where I stopped thinking of “architecture” as a pretty metaphor for Lacunae’s work.

She understands load-bearing details.

Something tiny can sit quietly inside one story and support something enormous somewhere else.

You do not always know what is holding the building up until you have already walked through it.

I read that and had to stop.

There are authors who write romance.

There are authors who write intimacy.

Lacunae writes the exact second when a person realises they have stopped protecting themselves.

That is different.

Her understanding of love is also one of the things that makes Perpetūra feel so distinctive to me.

Love here is rarely possession.

It is attention without confiscation.

A cup placed beside someone. A question left alone. A room acknowledged without demanding the key. A door that stays available. A hand offered rather than used to pull.

The reaching matters because the other person is allowed not to reach back.

That.

That is Lacunae’s kind of intimacy.

Seeing the whole machine running and handing the person a hard hat afterwards.

No pedestal.

No performance of understanding.

Just recognition at human scale.

And that becomes even more interesting inside a series concerned with connection, inheritance, pattern and the possibility that something inside us might have begun before we understood it.

Which produces one of the questions I carried out of this book:

If something inside you was already reaching before you knew why, does choosing it still count as choice?

I loved what Lacunae does with that question.

I am also being deliberately vague.

Please do not let helpful people explain this book to you beforehand.

We are dangerous.

Go in knowing as little as possible.

Let the title do its job later.

Let the title of the series do its job later too.

Let the things you thought you understood in The Ones Before wait patiently for you.

When they eventually move into place, you may experience the same deeply sophisticated literary reaction I did:

OH YOU CLEVER WOMAN.

Repeatedly.

There is something else I love here.

Not every mystery is murdered by an explanation.

Some questions become more meaningful when you finally understand enough to stop demanding that they close.

Perpetūra seems fascinated by spaces between things we tend to treat as opposites.

Connection and separation.

Choice and inheritance.

Being seen and remaining unknowable.

Happiness and grief.

Holding on and leaving something open.

Two truths do not always have to destroy each other.

Sometimes they simply have to occupy the same room.

Apparently this is my emotional weakness because Lacunae kept finding it and pressing on it.

Very considerate of her.

I received The Origin as an early ARC together with The Ones Before, and I am incredibly grateful I read them back to back.

Because when I finished Book Two, my first instinct was to go straight back to Book One.

Back to the hands.

Back to the objects.

Back to the pauses.

Back to everything I had believed was merely beautiful.

That is the mark of an extraordinary second book for me.

It does not only make you love what you have just read.

It changes what you already read.

Perpetūra is architecture.

And now I know the foundations were there all along.

This is where my admiration for the books became admiration for the project.

Perpetūra exists beyond the novels.

The books give readers one continuous road through each story. The interactive edition opens other roads.

Choices change the route. Other possibilities exist beyond the printed path. A codex gathers fragments and context. An Atlas makes the connections between lives something you can actively explore instead of simply being told about.

And the interactive version remains free to play in the browser.

That matters to me because none of this feels like random bonus content glued onto a book after publication.

It feels like the same artistic question expressed through different forms.

The word I keep coming back to is architecture.

Because this project is full of things that make sense at one scale and then acquire another meaning when you stand further away.

A sentence works inside a scene.

An object works inside one life.

A repeated gesture works inside a romance.

Then you move backwards and realise they were helping to hold something much larger together.

That is why calling Lacunae an artist does not feel like decorative praise to me.

She is thinking about prose. She is thinking about interface. She is thinking about visual identity. She is thinking about sound. She is thinking about what readers know, when they know it, and what happens when the same idea reaches us through a completely different medium.

It is all one house.