The Preparation - Emmanuel Akangbou

Five people who cannot find each other are all building toward the same event.

Nadia Pellor has spent seven years assembling a financial archive that no publication will print - a documented record of how tech billionaire Solomon Veil has spent two decades systematically hollowing the institutions a civilization would need to recognize a catastrophic threat. Her editor believes every word. He will not run it.

Solomon Veil has been preparing, since a dream at nineteen, for a civilizational threshold event he cannot quite name. The preparation is nearly complete.

Valor Creed has built a permission economy - nine years of giving crowds what they came for. He does not know what the architecture he has been part of is actually building toward. He has a rule about rooms he declines to enter.

Renata Solis is leaving the movement Creed built, one piece of her life at a time, writing a testimony under her own name about what she built and what it did.

Aurelius Hark has spent twenty years documenting the wars that made the world ready, in cities that no longer have their names, building a record against the day when someone will need to read it.

None of them knows the others exist.

The Preparation is a literary thriller in five voices - a novel about epistemic erosion, the architecture of belief, and what it means when the preparation is complete and the thing it was preparing for arrives.

For readers of Don DeLillo, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.