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THE BREATHING GLASS

THE BREATHING GLASS by ALBERT JOHN – ebook cover

In a world where only a piece of glass is allowed to tell the truth, everything depends on ninety seconds—and on the only woman who can count them. On the...

About this ebook

THE BREATHING GLASS by ALBERT JOHN is available in the Ebokio digital catalog as an EPUB ebook.

Price: £8.99. Language: English. Categories: Science Fiction & Fantasy.

In a world where only a piece of glass is allowed to tell the truth, everything depends on ninety seconds—and on the only woman who can count them. On the high plateau of Orraveth, there is not a drop of water and a crack in the earth six hundred meters deep that breathes.

From dusk until midnight, hot vapor rises through the wooden scaffolding, and nothing living survives inside it. Then the breath reverses. For ninety seconds, the air becomes completely still.

Afterward, the cold of the plateau plunges downward, and until dawn, two hundred people scrape the pale bloom from the walls by lamplight—the material from which they melt the glass that remembers: a single night, forever, soundless, incorruptible.

Courts, wills, borders, marriages—for one hundred and forty-eight years, Orsanne has lived by the principle that nothing is true until it appears in glass. A person’s testimony no longer counts in court. Iska Vane, twenty-six, calls the turning point.

She reads the crack’s breath through flame, silk, and clay, and two hundred people live or die according to her count; she is the best there has ever been. What she wants is simple: one clean night, two hundred workers going down and two hundred coming back up.

Her greatest obstacle is not an opponent, but a small, sealed glass plate on her windowsill that has shown her mother abandoning her for eighteen years—and which she has always believed because her own memory says otherwise, and in this country, memory is worthless.

Then an inspector arrives from the capital with a plate that refuses to remain still. A carrier is brought up dead at an hour when no one could have been inside the crack. And Iska descends alone into the darkness, where she finds an iron ladder that appears on no map.

THE BREATHING GLASS is a slow-burning, ice-cold, precise fantasy novel about evidence and who owns it.

It is about a company town where wages are paid in water jars and the dead are counted twice—and differently; about two women from two generations who make the same calculation and receive the same answer at different times; about a man who never raises his voice yet has done the most horrifying thing in the book; and about the question of what a person is worth when an entire society has forgotten how to believe what it sees with its own eyes.

It is told in language as exact as the craft it portrays, governed by a single, rigorously designed magical rule, and concludes with an ending that leaves nothing unresolved. A complete novel. Not book one of seven.

If you love books that do not explain an unfamiliar world but inhabit it—and if, by the end, you feel you could stand on that rocky ledge yourself and call out the ninety seconds—then pass it on.

An honest review is to a book like this what the cry from the edge is to the city below: the only thing others can use for guidance.

Book details

Details: 265 pages, about 74,074 words, published by ALBERT JOHN, publication date 21 August 2026.

Estimated reading time: about 5 hours.

Format, language, and reading

THE BREATHING GLASS is delivered as an EPUB ebook in English, and reads on phone, tablet, or computer through the Ebokio web reader with no app to install and no DRM.

Buyers can use Ebokio reading tools where supported, including adjustable themes and fonts, AI read aloud and text to speech, summaries, and Ask This Book for eligible owned titles.

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