Press kit
L. M. Tellson writes literary speculative fiction about memory, institutions, and the cost of a well-kept record. Entrustment, set in the archive-city of Averaunt, is a debut novel and the first book from Tellson Press.
A literary speculative novel about a city that keeps every memory—and the young auditor who discovers that a true record can still be a form of violence.
In Averaunt, the state keeps a continuous copy of every citizen's memory. Nineteen-year-old auditor Ailis Verane discovers that the Office's gentlest word—entrustment—names a procedure that erases the path that made a person themselves. She has been signing. Told through an account that marks its own holes and records what it has spent, the novel asks what separates testimony from a record—and who gets to decide.
For readers of Olga Ravn's The Employees, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, and Scott Alexander Howard's The Other Valley.
Ailis Verane is nineteen and audits the memory of Averaunt. The city keeps copies of its citizens' memories. Her office checks each final copy against the public record and resolves the difference. The work is quiet. Then an intake file arrives bearing the Office's gentlest word: entrustment. Ailis learns what the word actually names, and that she has been signing it.
What waits below is not resistance. It is keeping.
Three levels below the coverage line, beneath a sign that reads DIGNITY WITHOUT RECORD, people hold funerals for the legally living and keep the selves the Office has erased. They have been expecting her.
When the record and the person disagree, who gets to decide which one is real?
Told through an account that marks its own holes and records what it has spent, Entrustment is a literary speculative novel about institutions that speak softly while doing permanent things, for readers of Piranesi and Never Let Me Go.
- Why bureaucratic language can carry more terror than open violence.
- The difference between preserving testimony and preserving truth.
- Why an unreliable document can still be ethically honest.
- Archives as political architecture rather than neutral storage.
- Writing a future city through records, depositions, memorials, and omissions.
L. M. Tellson writes literary speculative fiction about memory, institutions, and the quiet violence of a well-kept record. Writing under a pen name, Tellson is the author of Entrustment, a debut novel set in the archive-city of Averaunt.
Tellson Press is the publishing imprint for work by L. M. Tellson. Entrustment is its first book.
Press materials in the right-hand column: a one-page fact sheet, the cover at web resolution, and the author photograph. Print-resolution cover (2400 × 3600), the 400 ppi TIFF master, and the full metadata sheet are supplied on request.
How the book was made is disclosed in full in “How This Book Was Made,” at the publication. That essay is the single canonical statement.
