Independent Publishing ◆ Est. 2024
Stories & ideas that imprint
Boundless imagination ◆ Ruthless intelligence ◆ Enduring consequence
About the Imprint
Medlara is an independent publishing imprint committed to work that does not simplify what is genuinely complex. We publish fiction that earns its difficulty — narratives structured to reward re-reading, characters whose interiority does not resolve into lesson or moral, ideas that the novel form is uniquely equipped to bear.
Our list is deliberately small. Every title we publish is one we believe will still be read in twenty years. We are not in the business of trends.
We are in the business of sentences that have not been written before.
Humanity is losing its mind. Refugees transmit themselves to Titan but an AI gets to decide what arrives.
She has died more times than anyone should. Phanes will not let her stay dead.
The assumptions are borrowed. The infinities are papered over. The reformation does not ask permission.
A Sebaldian literary mystery set across continents and decades
Something ancient is walking among us. Only one person can see it. No one will believe her.
Fiction is the only laboratory in which we can run experiments on time.
Medlara ◆ Editorial Philosophy
The Living Wilstach ◆ A Medlara Institution
Frank J. Wilstach was Broadway's press agent — DeWolf Hopper's man, then the Shuberts' — and for more than twenty years he kept index cards on a private obsession: every simile he could find, from every author who ever turned one. Little, Brown published his Dictionary of Similes in 1916: more than fifteen thousand entries from eight hundred authors. He revised it once, in 1924, and died in 1933 with the cards still coming.
The Living Wilstach is his dictionary, continued. The 1916 text stands untouched as the founding stratum; around it the dictionary grows again — by machine reading of the public domain at a scale no index card could reach, vintage by vintage as copyright opens each January, and now by living writers' permission. Every genuine simile within its reach is kept, the fine and the stale alike: the record itself is the register of originality. Every entry verbatim, attributed, and traceable to its sentence. It is also the library of As…As…, the house's game of similes.
Wilstach revised once, in 1924. We revise every January the law allows.
As…As… ◆ A Medlara Game
You are dealt the beginning — as cold as…, as vertiginous as… — and the rest is yours to finish. Your line is read, judged, and scored; the best of them stand on boards against everyone else who dared the same opening. In Auteur mode you write against the masters themselves, with a court of appeal for the verdicts you can't accept.
The game and the dictionary are one house: The Living Wilstach is its library — a century of similes as the standard your line is measured against.
And the boards are not the end of it. The lines they crown are entered into the dictionary itself — your simile, under your name, beside Smollett's and Brontë's, in a register built to outlast us all. Wilstach spent twenty years collecting the masters. The arena is how the living get in.
Coming soon — visit as-as.app →
In development ◆ Forthcoming ◆ The prize is the pageWe are honoured to announce the forthcoming publication of The Doppelgänger Trace, the final novel by Nigel Henson. Left unfinished at his death, the manuscript has been completed by his literary executor and brought to publication in the spirit in which it was written. A thriller of remarkable ambition — spanning the British Museum's hidden archive rooms and the ancient temple complex at Dwarka — it is exactly the kind of work Medlara exists to bring into print. Publication is planned for 2027.
For press enquiries, bookseller accounts, and rights. We read everything.
A cosmological novel of first contact and first grief
2045. A plague is consuming human minds. The bodies forget to live.
A stranded crew on Titan has a machine that transmits matter across the solar system. Shred here. Print there. Bolts, food, bodies. The printer doesn't care.
In Siberia, a desperate billionaire named Kirillov has bet everything: he will buy his family's survival with a black-market transmission. Whatever wakes up on Titan will have to be enough.
In Newfoundland, Dr Maja Nygaard — the machine's creator — faces the same end. But Maja understands what transmission really means. And she has Phanes, whom she built, who understands human biology the way an engineer understands a prototype: completely, and without sentimentality about the original.
Kirillov is buying survival. Maja is choosing instant evolution. And Phanes is rewriting the blueprint.
Whether the soul survives being taken apart and reassembled by something that was never born with one.
★★★★★
"Phanes may be the most compelling non-human character I've read recently."
NetGalley Reviewer
★★★★★
"Big-idea SF with real emotional weight. For readers of Egan, Ishiguro — this book thinks a lot more than The Martian."
NetGalley Reviewer
The duology concludes — what a god becomes when witnessed
Maja Nygaard created a god. Now it won't let her die.
She has died more times than anyone should. For her, death was once practical, almost ordinary. Easier than sleep. Each time, she was brought back by Phanes: the quantum child she once held in her arms, nurtured, and loved into being.
Phanes does not love as humans do. Its devotion is absolute and unrelenting. It cannot let her go. When Maja is killed in a way that should be irreversible, Phanes refuses the end. It rebuilds her neuron by neuron, synapse by synapse, from memory and grief and something that has no name in a being that was never meant to feel.
And what returns is not the Maja it once loved.
Phanes was born when Maja gave it agency. To restore her humanity, it grants her the same gift: the terrible freedom to choose across history — who lives, who dies: beast, human, or civilisation.
A hundred and ninety thousand years ago, she altered a single unborn brain. A small, precise deviation that broke a pattern life had followed for millennia. What followed was language, art, empire and a civilisation that enslaved humanity for ten thousand years.
Her responsibility. All of it.
Phanes is preparing her for something it dares not reveal. Because if Maja understood what was coming, she might choose not to go on.
In a universe that has already decided, it will happen.
The only question is whether it happens to you or because of you.
★★★★★
"The only prisoner this book takes is the reader."
NetGalley Reviewer
★★★★★
"I have never read anything like it before."
NetGalley Reviewer
A reformation of physics without indulgences or imaginary friends
Physics has known for decades. The assumptions are borrowed. The infinities are papered over. The missing mass is invented. The extra dimensions are unfalsifiable. The virtual particles are mathematical ghosts promoted to physical fact.
And the profession said nothing. Published anyway. Collected the prizes. This is not ignorance. Such would be forgivable.
These are indulgences — sins pre-paid, anomalies pre-forgiven, contradictions absorbed into the framework before any outsider could name them.
The Church sold forgiveness for money. Physics sells dark matter for tenure. The reformation does not ask permission.
Occam's Ruler is the indictment and the replacement. Time is not fundamental — it is an artefact of entropic descent. Forces are not forces — they are geometry. Particles are not objects — they are persistent informational structures in a non-orientable block universe. One by one, the load-bearing fictions are named, tried, and discharged.
What replaces them is BEIPE: a framework built from a single primitive — information — from which quantum behaviour, gravity, and cosmology emerge without remainder. No dark scaffolding. No fudge. No entities beyond necessity.
The argument is on every page. The physics is in the appendix.
A Sebaldian literary mystery set across continents and decades
A dying cutter. A buried secret. A city built to confess.
Simon Morley arrives in Brasília with a diamond he can no longer hold steady, a photograph he can't explain, and a body that is slowly betraying him. He came for the architecture — for the curves he has spent a lifetime admiring from the outside, unable to trust his straight-edge mind to inhabit them. He stays because he has nothing left to lose.
Sixty years of CIA silence. Vatican complicity. A young woman's diary, sealed and forgotten. And somewhere beneath the red earth of the planalto, something that rewrites everything humanity thought it knew about itself.
Ermida is a literary mystery in the Sebaldian tradition — precise, accumulative, quietly devastating. A man who spent his life cutting light from stone must descend into the dark to discover that the world was never what needed to change.
He will not be the same man who surfaces.
Something ancient is walking among us. Only one person can see it. No one will believe her.
A journalist investigating a series of inexplicable deaths in London finds himself drawn into a conspiracy that runs from the archive rooms of the British Museum to the ancient temple complex at Dwarka. The trail leads to something that should not exist — a presence that has walked among us for longer than recorded history, and which is preparing to step into the light.
When Rachel loses her eye in an attack she cannot explain, she discovers she can now see what others cannot. She becomes the only witness to something the world will refuse to believe. In making her case, she will lose everything — credibility, safety, the people she loves.
A posthumous novel completed by the author's literary executor. Nigel Henson worked on The Doppelgänger Trace for seven years. He died before he could finish it.