New York City, 2075. Filipino-American Nick Carraway has just moved to the heart of the fractured New Americas, where he’s struck by the city’s contradictions—shining corporate towers casting bleak shadows over the slums of a crumbling middle class.
When Nick meets alluring new-money Jay Gatsby, he falls for Gatsby’s frank charm and confident aura. But in a city where the wealthy flaunt tech-enhanced bodies to cheat death, surfaces aren’t all they seem—and as a corporate-sanctioned cyberspace hacker, Nick knows that no secret can stay buried forever. He’s the reason they don’t. And his latest assignment? Investigate Gatsby himself.
As Nick becomes entangled in the dark affairs of the elite—and the devastating fallout of their actions on the city’s most vulnerable—he must reckon with the limits of compassion and accountability across class and status. What takes precedence: Love, or truth? Heart, or soul?
A brilliant reimagining of Fitzgerald’s classic tale of glamour, desire, and desperation, Local Heavens examines the guardrails of morality… and the price of desire.
K. M. Fajardo is a second-generation Filipino-Canadian writer based in Toronto. She graduated from the University of Waterloo with a degree in Global Business and Digital Arts before working in the tech industry. A speculative fiction writer, she enjoys stories that straddle genres and characters that find home in strange worlds. After a childhood spent roaming bookstores, she now lives and writes in the city with her rescue cat, Clementine, and can occasionally be found haunting the nearest café. LOCAL HEAVENS is her debut novel. Find her online at kmfajardo.com.
