Identity
How people construct themselves when memory, expectation, trauma, and desire pull them in different directions.
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Novel in Progress
Hearth
A surreal literary fantasy about identity, memory, trauma, empathy, power, and the unstable border between fantasy and reality.
About the Novel
A world fractured by war and the uncertainty of everyday life
Hearth follows the twins Vex and Katie as they struggle to understand themselves in a war-torn world shaped by grief, fractured memory, strange powers, and uncertain truths.
Their journey moves between the intimate and the cosmic: childhood stories, damaged relationships, and personal failings; and surreal landscapes, hidden histories, and supernatural forces.
At its center, Hearth asks what it means to become whole when identity itself feels divided, and whether empathy can remain possible in a world built around fear, violence, and control.
Recurring Ideas
Themes
The novel returns to these questions across its characters, settings, and intertwined stories.
Memory
The ways memory protects, distorts, traps, and rebuilds people.
Empathy
How understanding others (whether someone has a bad day or a supercosmic threat destroys a planet) always is the solution.
Time
Time is a force that bends, fragments, repeats, and reshapes the meaning of experience and existence.
Fantasy and Reality
The unstable divide between imagination, memory, fantasy, perception, and the physical world.
Hope
The possibility of choosing a direction even when certainty, safety, and simple answers no longer exist.
The People of Hearth
Featured Characters
These introductions are intentionally brief so that the story can reveal the characters gradually.
Twin
Vex
Introspective, uncertain, and deeply affected by the past, Vex searches for meaning while struggling to understand his own mind and the world transforming around him.
Twin
Katie
Katie shares Vex’s history but responds to it in her own way. Her strength, vulnerability, and developing power make her central to the novel’s emotional and moral conflicts.
Companion
Scarlett
Scarlett becomes part of the unstable group surrounding the twins, carrying her own history, loyalties, and understanding of the world’s dangers.
Companion
Ottie
Ottie brings another perspective to the story’s shifting relationships, moral uncertainty, and struggle for survival.
Character
Jonathan
An introduction to Jonathan is coming soon.
The Setting
A familiar world made strange
The world of Hearth contains ruined landscapes, unstable institutions, dreamlike spaces, and places that appear to exist outside ordinary time.
Its setting is shaped as much by perception as geography. Rooms, forests, roads, memories, and entire worlds can become reflections of the people moving through them.
Selected Writing
Read from Hearth
Begin with the Prelude. Additional chapters and excerpts can be added here as the novel develops.
Prelude
Prelude | Vex
Vex remembers the final bedtime story his father told him and Katie on the night before his death. An introduction to the whole series.
Read the Prelude →Future Excerpt
Prologue | The Spirit
A spirit awakens. An introduction to the first book.
Coming SoonFuture Excerpt
Chapter One | Vex | Red Snow
Vex prepares for a school trip to Gravings, New Jersey, now a 16 year kid.
Coming SoonBehind the Novel
Writing Hearth
Hearth began as an exploration of reflection, fractured identity, fantasy as salvation, and the desire to find truth in a world where certainty may not exist.
The novel combines literary fiction, surrealism, psychological realism, fantasy, and philosophical inquiry. Its form changes with its characters, allowing memories, embedded stories, dreams, and alternate perspectives to reshape the narrative.
- Status
- In Progress
- Form
- Novel
- Genres
- Literary Fantasy, Surrealism, Psychological Fiction
- Author
- Ness Uskert
Begin Reading
Enter the world of Hearth
Read the Prelude, then return to explore more of my fiction, poetry, essays, and creative work.