The Chronicles of
Book OneBreaking Ground
The groundskeeper is dead. The garden knows who did it.
The prologue, as a film
Every chapter of the novel opens with a fragment of an old, broken text called The Book of Coming Down. This is that text told whole: the branches, the snakes below, the herds crossing the grass, and the small pale things that grew where the herds had passed. Watercolor, four minutes, no spoilers.
Music: "Rising Tide" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under CC BY 4.0.
The book
Josh Plowen is eighteen, newly orphaned twice over, and reasonably sure the official story is wrong. His great-uncle Frederick raised him in a small Geneva flat on a groundskeeper's wages: packed lunches, warm boots by the radiator, a whole quiet economy of care that Josh only priced after the shop closed. Then Frederick dies in an accident that will not sit still. A ladder. His own shears. A night job for a duke of a country no map has heard of.
The paperwork is tidy. The letter waiting on Josh's pillow is not. It carries a mushroom insignia, and it leads down: to a hidden order older than the city, to a diary that opens a page at a time, and to a slow green war being waged, politely, beneath the streets of Geneva. The face of that war is a hedge. It has a mustache. It is winning.
Josh came looking for a culprit. What he finds is a job nobody finished, a blade that remembers, and the oldest question in the garden: not who did this, but who he plans to become.
A book about the people who keep things alive and are mistaken for simple because of it.
Free sample
The prologue and the first two chapters are free, in full, with no signup. Each one comes with its audiobook chapter, so you can read, listen, or both.
The Book of Coming Down
7 min listenBeginnings
13 min listenOrigins
16 min listenOrigin
It started as a joke I was making at my own expense.
In 2019 I was studying abroad in Sweden, which is a good place to have long winters and not enough to do in them. Somewhere in that stretch I was traveling, and I spent an afternoon walking through the botanical gardens in Geneva. I remember thinking that the people who work in a place like that are invisible in a very specific way. You look at the garden. You do not look at whoever has been keeping it alive for the last fifty years.
The joke came first. I had been turning over the observation that there are no superheroes based on plants, and the reason seemed obvious: a plant superhero would be incredibly lame. What is the pitch? He grows a shrub at you. I thought that was funny for about a week.
Then it stopped being funny and started being a question, which is how these things go. If it is lame, why is it lame? Plants outnumber us, outlast us, and feed us. We are enormously dependent on a kingdom we treat as scenery. The only reason a plant hero sounds ridiculous is that we have decided, collectively and without discussion, that green things are furniture.
Once I saw that, the groundskeeper showed up almost immediately: a man nobody notices, tending a place nobody thinks about, who turns out to have been holding a line the whole time. And once I had him, I had the thing I actually wanted to write about, which was never really plants. It was the people who do the quiet keeping. The packed lunches. The boots by the radiator. The economy of care you only notice the price of after it stops.
I started it in 2019. It took until 2026 to become a book. Most of that is life happening in between, which turned out to be the part the book needed anyway. Grief showed up. So did a few hard years I would not have chosen. The story got better and I got slower, and somewhere in there it stopped being a joke about a shrub and became a novel about a kid learning that the work nobody claps for is still the work.
Sean Even
Inside the book
The novel braids two kinds of chapter. The odd-numbered chapters carry Josh forward. The even-numbered chapters step away from him entirely: a diary, an archive, a set of water-damaged field notes, a keeper from another century, the war from the other side. They are interludes, and they are where the world gets big.
Every chapter opens with a fragment of The Book of Coming Down, an old text with gaps in it that no keeper has ever filled, because inventing what is missing would be a lie.
The oldest telling: the branches, the snakes in the grass, and the few who came down anyway.
A boy, a great-uncle, a fishing rod, and the knock at the door that ends the only life Josh had.
How a treaty between the kingdoms of life was torn, and who was left holding the shears.
An address, an hour, and a door under the Alpine garden that has been waiting for him.
Frederick's diary, and the hedge he raised like a son.
Botany school as an alibi. Josh learns that two lives do not stay separate for long.
What an archive keeps, and what it quietly refuses to say.
A clue keyed to shared labor. Some inheritances are buried where only you would think to look.
Another keeper, another century, another cost.
Josh goes down into the cistern certain he is ready. He is not.
Field notes from an expedition that never came home.
The bill arrives all at once, and a king asks a question that sounds like an accusation.
A life spent between uses of a gift.
The shears remember every cut. Josh finally learns what they witnessed.
The war from the other side of the hedge.
The gardens, the choice, and what it costs to become the thing you were left.
The outline above is deliberately light on the back half. The middle of this book has a few turns in it that are better met in person.
Where it stands
Complete at roughly 53,000 words, and currently in editing. The text you can read here is current, and may still change before print.
In progress. The book is being illustrated throughout, in the same watercolor style as the film above. Interior plates and spot illustrations are being drawn now.
Interior and cover files are prepared for a 6 by 9 paperback. Release details will be posted here.
A full recording is planned. The sample chapters here are a preview of the audio edition.
What comes next
Breaking Ground is the first book. It closes its own story and pays off what it promises, but it leaves a few doors deliberately open. The second is Standing Water, and it is mapped end to end: twenty four chapters, outlined.
Standing Water begins on a night in September 2008, in a control room under Geneva, when a beam went around a ring for the first time and four hundred people applauded. Something that night went very slightly wrong, in the way a floor is wrong when it is one degree out of level, which is to say invisible until you set something round on it. Nobody reported it.
Book Two runs on two strands instead of one. Josh has the first. The second belongs to someone born on the night of the beam, who has no business existing, and who knows it. Their chapters alternate, and their arcs run in opposite directions: his is a descent into losing himself, and hers is a climb into having a self at all.
The interludes turn at last to the orders Book One only glimpsed. Chaga, Reishi, Cordyceps, Psilocybe, Amanita, Turkey Tail, and last of all Lion's Mane.
The questions Book One left standing stay standing. What happened to Josh's parents. And the cosmology glimpsed exactly once, in the one marked gap in The Book of Coming Down, and never explained: the One that the telling gives no name and no shape, the Many who serve or watch, the twice seven who keep the ledger of what the woken do worst and what they do best, and the few faces that keep coming back, as if coming down were a door that some are not done using.
Standing Water is in outline. The prologue and first chapter are being written now.
Somewhere, every morning, someone stands at the foot of the last tree with everything to lose and no way to know it yet.
from The Book of Coming Down
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