The night the sky stopped being empty, you were the only human alive who could read what was written on the stars.

You are Dr. Julian "Jules" Cross - the sharpest field archaeologist of your generation, standing at the bottom of a New Mexico trench with a four-thousand-year-old disk in your hands, when the stars above you begin going out in straight, deliberate rows. They are not stars going out. They are things arriving. And four hundred miles away, the first people are already gone - including the only family you have left.

This is interactive survival fiction where YOU make every choice. Every page hands you a decision and a number; you pick one, you turn to it, and the path you didn't take is the one that's allowed to kill you. Choose badly and you die - then the page tells you why, and sends you back to learn what it cost a life to know.

Three rules keep you breathing: observe before you act. Stillness is your skin; movement is a flare. The door that wants you is the wrong door. And cut into the disk are eight sigils of a language older than the pyramids and not, it turns out, of this earth. Find all eight on the one true path and you'll hold something the invasion would burn the planet to keep out of your hands. Most readers will miss them. You are not most readers.

Book One of the Invasion trilogy.

You are not reading this story. You are being processed by it.

You are Eli Moreau, a polymath grad student on the worst morning in the history of Chicago - the morning the sky tears open and the Bureau arrives: a cold extra-dimensional administration that processes whole worlds into filing systems. It recruits you on sight, because a mind that reads everything is exactly the kind of mind it most wants to harvest.

In this interactive gamebook, YOU make every choice. The Gauntlet is a machine for killing clever people, and you are the cleverest it has ever met, so it will try very hard. Bold options are bait. Powerful cards are hooks. The cleverest-looking move is almost always the one built to flatter you into your own filing. Choose wrong and you die - graphically, specifically, always your own fault - and the page sends you back to learn faster than the machine does.

But here is the secret the whole trilogy turns on: the Bureau can process your brilliance, your fear, and your despair. It cannot process a man who refuses to abandon the weak. Every person you save stays with you - not as an ally, but as weight you must keep choosing to carry. The party is not your support. The party is your weapon: the one thing the wheel has never learned to metabolize.

Collect all eight hidden sigils. Carry everyone. Don't take the powerful card.

Book One of The Gauntlet trilogy.

You are Sam Reyes: thirty-four, eleven years transcribing homicide trials for the county. It is 1:14 in the morning in the gravel lot behind the Anchor on Delmore Street, and your sister's ex is on the ground and not getting up.

You came to warn him off. You sat in the car rehearsing for twenty minutes first.

Now every choice is yours. A call. A lie. A door. A silence. Turn to the number you pick, and keep choosing. Choose wrong and you get caught, specifically and humiliatingly, and the ending names your exact mistake. Choose clever and the world might just kill you first, because a man who sits in a chair for a living was not built for fences in the rain.

There is one true path through: the quiet, not the clever.

An interactive crime gamebook where the case is hunting you.

Some doors are left open for the daughters who come after us. Some are left open as a warning.

By every measure her mother would have recognized, she has won: the four-bedroom house, the husband who smells like sawdust and Old Spice, two children who are alive and only occasionally trying to kill each other. She married up and out of the apartment over the laundromat — so why does she keep locking herself in the downstairs bathroom to finish just one more chapter?

Because the women in her family have always kept a secret folded into the pages. Some books are doors. And when eighty-one-year-old Tía Carmen calls the house to say it's starting — and you'd know what that means, so stop pretending you don't, a door that has been waiting two hundred years swings open at last.

What lives at the bottom of the worst book ever written is a thing made of every despair her family ever swallowed in silence — and it has been patient. To close the door, she will have to go down into the dark and do the one impossible thing no woman in her line has ever managed. The price of the door is the person she loves most.

Book One of the Pages We Leave Open trilogy is a luminous, fiercely funny, heart-cracking novel about mothers and daughters, the stories we inherit, and the light we leave on for the ones still to come. For readers of Alice Hoffman, Isabel Allende, and The Ten Thousand Doors of January.

To remember is to resist. To write is to protect.