Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Lightbreakers by Aja Gabel, which will be published by Riverhead Books on November 4, 2025. You can pre-order your copy here.

In the beginning, there was happiness. Maya, an artist obsessed with the nature of beauty, and Noah, a quantum physicist preoccupied by the mysteries of the universe, found in each other a shared curiosity about the world. But beneath the surface of their happy marriage is a third rail: Serena, the lost child that Noah had with his ex-wife, Eileen.

One day Noah gets a call from an eccentric billionaire, asking him to participate in a clandestine project aiming to unravel the secrets of time and consciousness. The couple agrees to relocate to the Janus Lab, deep in the desert, where Noah finds himself drawn into a dangerous kind of time travel that could result in seeing Serena again.

As Noah delves into this groundbreaking, fringe work, his past begins to overtake him. And when his ex-wife, Eileen, joins the project, Maya embarks on a journey back to her own past, one that takes her to Japan, to her family, and to a formative lover who once shattered her heart. As Noah, Maya, and Eileen grapple with the balance between holding on and letting go, new information emerges that the Janus Lab might not be exactly what it seems.  

A heart-achingly moving novel, Lightbreakers plumbs the mysteries of human connection, and explores how to love in a world where time is both a healer and a thief.

Here is the cover, designed by Sara Wood.

Aja Gabel: “My book is about grief, but it isn’t a sad book. It is about living: how to breathe in the wake of loss, how to love someone who has been changed by tragedy, and how to move between versions of yourself. So when it came to the cover, I wasn’t sure how we would find a way to communicate that balance between loss and love. But this cover achieves that beyond what I could have imagined. The design is viscerally alive with vibrant, warm colors, the shades of a sun either just rising or about to set. The graphic elements—the vultures, the man and the woman, the cactus—all have movement and shape, even as they exist on separate planes, in search of each other. And hands down my favorite part of the cover is the orange and pink pattern. For me it represents the speculative elements of Lightbreakers by making visual the idea of a time portal, of shifting between memories and possible lives, while also exuding warmth and hope. 

There’s something else about the cover that feels personal to me. When I was a preteen, I found in my parents’ book collection a mid-70s edition of Walter Tevis’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, about an alien who comes to Earth in the form of a human, looking for a way to bring his people with him. I immediately read it and then read it again, and it was pivotal to my early love of speculative fiction. The cover featured David Bowie’s profile (he played the alien in the movie adaptation) in an upside down triangle set against a burnt orange planet, with lettering that was somehow both futuristic and antiquated. When I saw the Lightbreakers cover, I instantly thought of The Man Who Fell to Earth. In an almost Easter egg way, it subtly recalls those retro sci-fi book covers with its saturated graphics, a focus on geometric shapes, and an elongated mid-century font. I like to think of the resonance as a nod to that younger version of me who was first electrified by the idea of the impossible woven into the fabric of our reality, only visible if you had a flexible imagination and a borderless heart.”

Sara Wood: “For this cover I wanted to capture the shared and disparate journeys of Noah and Maya as they reach into their individual pasts. The pattern of repeated, overlapping circles represents the ‘episodic fold’ experiments conducted at Janus Labs, as well as the natural accumulations of human memory. You can see Noah and Maya each walking into this pattern, with the looming prickly pear cactus—a staple of the West Texan high desert—standing between them. Ominous turkey vultures—a persistent artistic symbol for Maya—circle above, signaling a passage from one life phase to the next. As much as these characters struggle with the push/pull of their quantum entanglement, there is so much warmth and beauty throughout this story, and I definitely had that feeling in mind when selecting the cover’s color palette.”