Amabel's Children

Amabel’s Children is a haunting, genre‑defying novel that moves between the living and the dead, the digital and the primal, the televised and the deeply personal. At its center is Amabel Hadley, a once‑famous actress whose life ended too soon—but whose consciousness did not. Now a ghost drifting host‑to‑host, she witnesses fragments of the world through the eyes of animals, strangers, and fleeting moments of human life. Her only constant is longing: for the children she never lived to raise, and for the life she left unfinished.Those children—nine of them, born from frozen embryos and raised by different families on a reality show created after Amabel’s death—are now teenagers. They grew up separately, watched by millions, measured and compared like living experiments. A decade after the show ended, they reconnect through a series of glitchy Zoom calls, each carrying their own wounds, identities, and questions about who they are and what binds them. Are they siblings? Strangers? Products of fame? Or something stranger still?Meanwhile, Carl Walchuk—Amabel’s husband and the biological father of the children—has vanished into the Amazon rainforest, dissolving into a world without numbers, memory, or mirrors. His chapters pulse with disorientation and yearning as he drifts between past and present, haunted by the family he abandoned and the life he can no longer fully recall.As the narrative spirals between these three perspectives—ghost, children, and father—it becomes a meditation on identity, inheritance, trauma, and the strange afterlives created by media. The novel asks what it means to be born for an audience, to be shaped by forces you never chose, and to search for connection in a world that has already decided who you are.Darkly hypnotic and emotionally charged, Amabel’s Children blends literary fiction with metaphysical mystery, psychological tension, and a razor‑sharp critique of celebrity culture. Gregory Wolos writes with a voice that is both feral and precise, refusing to look away from the beauty and brutality of human experience. The result is a novel that lingers long after the final page—unsettling, intimate, and impossible to forget Read more