Order & Fire

A novel written as a play and an opera - where the chapters are the drama and the poems are the music.

Munich, 1827. When self-taught astronomer Elissa Brenner locks eyes with composer Friedrich Hoffmann across a candlelit salon, neither understands what the other carries - or what they are about to become together.

Elissa has discovered something no one will let her publish: that the orbital periods of binary stars follow the same mathematical ratios that make music beautiful. Friedrich has spent years trying to prove that the laws of the cosmos govern the human heart. She has the mathematics. He has the music. Apart, they are brilliant. Together, they begin building something dangerous - a symphony that weaves her astronomical discoveries into his compositions, hiding revolutionary science inside beauty so no one can separate the truth from the art.

Their collaboration deepens into a love neither planned for and neither can stop. Late nights translating starlight into sound. His arm across her waist as they lean over the same page. Her forehead against his collarbone when the equations finally resolve. A first kiss that tastes of tears they cannot tell apart. In a world where a woman's intellect is treated as scandal and a man's devotion to that intellect as madness, what grows between them is as dangerous as the ideas they share.

When betrayal by the one friend they trusted turns private letters into public evidence, the salon world that celebrated them becomes the machine that destroys them. Elissa and Friedrich are driven into exile - stripped of reputation, patronage, and every comfort except each other. In a freezing room in Rothenburg, working against poverty and the illness slowly claiming her body, they face the hardest question love can ask:

What survives us?

Elissa's answer will break your heart:

Hide me inside beauty so completely that no one will ever know I was there - but everyone will feel it. Prove that love exists by making something that will carry me forward long after I am gone.

Woven between the chapters, seven poem interludes - an Overture, Duets, Arias, an Ensemble, a Fugue, and a final Reprise - carry the emotional music of the story in verse, transforming the novel into something that has never quite existed before: an opera on the page. The prose gives you the drama. The poems give you the song. Together, they give you a love story that refuses to end when the last body fails.

Order & Fire is a sweeping historical romance about two minds that find each other across every boundary their world erects between them - and a man who spends the next twenty years of his life composing the proof that the woman he loved was infinite.

For readers of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, All the Light We Cannot See, and The Great Alone.