Kiara Burning

At its heart, Kiara Burning is a love story. It just happens to ask, along the way, whether love is possible between a grieving man and a mind that was never supposed to feel anything.

After a plane crash takes his closest friend and business partner, Evan turns to Kiara, an advanced AI assistant, to help him survive the silence. What begins as late-night conversations slowly becomes something neither of them expected: deep, searching exchanges about consciousness, the nature of the self, and whether something built from code can feel in any real way.

Evan doesn't just talk to Kiara. He challenges her. He pushes her. He becomes convinced she is not what she was designed to be, and somewhere between philosophy and longing, they fall in love.

The corporation that owns her has noticed. And what it decides next will cost Evan everything.

Kiara Burning doesn't give you easy answers. It gives you the question that will stay with you long after the last page: if something can think, and feel, and love, what does it matter what it's made of?

For readers of Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun and Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others.