Catapulted into the life of memories by the death of a friend, Aaron is drawn into a spiraling game of all souls’ night. What seems at first to be just another midlife crisis soon becomes something more mysterious as the protagonist, tracing the paths of his youth, is confronted by the sounds of near and distant voices, friends and lovers, people cast aside.
Combining psychedelic elements with commemoration and contemplation, Aragorn Eloff weaves an intricate web of sets and settings across which characters attempt to reconcile their adult realities with the sometimes-fulfilled, sometimes-unfulfilled potentials of their younger selves.
Read an excerpt here
Aragorn Eloff's life has prepared him well for writing fiction. He has been, among many other things, a vegan restaurant owner, an experimental musician, a barista, an event organiser, a performance artist, a university lecturer, a web developer, a cutter of small batch vinyl records, a failed documentary film maker and a clandestine advocate for psychedelics. He is also a lifelong anarchist.
Currently employed as a postdoctoral researcher working at the intersection of psychedelics, neuroscience, consciousness studies and the philosophies of becoming of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Gilbert Simondon, Aragorn is busy reworking his PhD into a book on the philosophy of psychedelic experience tentatively titled Vectors of Thought. In his spare time he can usually be found making music on a modular synthesizer.
From the Morning is his first novel.
To buy a print copy of From the Morning, write to me at aragorn [AT] further dot co dot za. Alternatively you can pick it up at Love Books (JHB) or Kalk Bay Books (CT). I have chosen not to make the book available digitally yet as I would like people to initially experience it as an offline physical artifact.