[QCrit] Afterimage, Adult Literary Upmarket, 89,000 Words, First Attempt

Hi everyone! Please don’t flame me. I’ve never posted on here before. I only just downloaded Reddit yesterday!

I’ve just finished editing my draft for Afterimage. It’s with beta readers at the moment, so I’m preparing my query package. For context, this is my third full-length novel. I haven’t queried book #1 and book #2 didn’t get me agent despite over a dozen full requests. :/ Any tips or thoughts would be helpful:

I am seeking representation for Afterimage, an upmarket novel complete at 90,000 words. Blending the emotional introspection of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun with the quiet mystery of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, Afterimage asks what we owe the dead, and how much of them lives on in those they leave behind.

For almost forty years, Simon Howell has lived the same quiet life, driving the night-shift tram through the rain-soaked streets of coastal Dunport.

In Dunport, memories can be extracted, sold, bought, and replayed. A thriving black market profits on stolen and illicit memories, while the city’s forgotten turn into Hollows, people who’ve sold off so much of themselves they barely resemble who they once were. Simon has watched enough Hollows wander in and out of his carriage over the years to want nothing to do with the memory trade, legal or otherwise. So when he wins a box of bargain-bin memories in a work raffle, all he expects is an underwhelming peek into a stranger’s mind.

Instead, he becomes obsessed with the life of a young woman named Iris. Simon doesn’t know who she is, why her memories were discarded, or why he can’t stop replaying them. Unable to accept that her existence could be reduced to forgotten recordings, Simon makes a choice that upends his carefully constructed routine: he decides to find the woman behind the memories.

Simon’s search pulls him into the bowels of Dunport’s memory trade, where he forms an unlikely partnership with Mr. Avery, an eccentric Hollow and clever navigator of the city’s seedy corners. Together they follow a trail of illicit memories that leads Simon deeper into obsession—until he uncovers Iris’s Fatal, the preserved memory of her final moments, and the killer responsible for them.

But every replay blurs the line between what happened to Iris and what’s happening to him, until Simon can no longer tell whether he’s investigating Dunport or racing the clock on his own Hollowing.

[AUTHOR BIO]

Thank you for your consideration! I’d be delighted to send more materials upon request.