When Tess Maxwell was young, she was fascinated by her father’s stories of the world and space around them. After his death, the world fell out of sync. The Paradox Club by Charlie Lovett brings us a story of a young woman figuring out the world and the secrets behind her father’s death.
The Paradox Club brings us a mystery that is packed with cryptic puzzles to work out. Tess has to delve into the world of a covert organization that goes by the name of the title of the novel. Scholars guard the knowledge of power that could reshape all of human history behind what seems to be an unremarkable Manhattan brownstone. That’s the perfect way for a secret organization to hide, right?
However, that club is starting to fracture thanks to a rogue member. Tess’s family is somehow at the heart of everything, and now she has to deal with her grief and the voices in her head that keep telling her something bad is going to happen to save not just herself and what’s left of her family, but the entire world!
This is more than a mystery. It’s a story of scientific intrigue and buried histories. If you love the likes of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code or Angels and Demons then you’re going to adore The Paradox Club, which is out on Sept. 1, 2026.
Parade has been fortunate enough to reveal an exclusive excerpt from the upcoming novel from Hyperion Avenue. We just into the start of Tess’s life, as she remembers back to when she knew that something bad was going to happen. As we get a look at how Tess is sure she needs to write the alphabet backward 20 times and line up 15 pencils perfectly, we get just the start of the mystery that is set to unfurl years later for this child struggling to figure out how to do what the voices tell her to do.
Courtesy of Hyperion AvenueTake a look at the excerpt and get ready for The Paradox Club:
Fire on the Island
On a night two weeks after Harry told his daughter Tess about infinite universes, the voices in her head would not be silenced. She had learned Morse code the previous summer when she was eleven, but no matter how many times she tapped shut up on the top of the little desk in the room she shared with Vivian, the voices kept up their incessant nattering—worse than ever before. If you don’t line up the Legos, something bad will happen. So, she lined up the Legos. If you don’t write the alphabet backward twenty times, something bad will happen. So, she wrote the alphabet backward twenty times. But still they kept on.
She and Harry hadn’t gone to the dock that night because a front had swept through and dark clouds filled the sky, threatening rain and lightning and obscuring the stars. Nights when she couldn’t see Harry’s star made her nervous. The wind whistled through the pine trees and blew hard enough that twigs and small branches occasionally thwapped against the roof, making Tess jump in her chair. The air felt electric, as it often did before a summer storm, but this time Tess tingled not with excitement but with unease. The whole universe seemed on edge and the voices knew it.
She had a set of twenty-five colored pencils in a metal box in her desk and the voices insisted that they each be sharpened to a fine point and that they all be the exact same length. The only sharpener she had was one of those cheap plastic ones that came in your school pencil box, and it made precision all but impossible. Every time she had ten pencils perfectly lined up, the point would break on the eleventh one. Or when she had fifteen lined up, she’d notice that the royal blue was a hair shorter than the others. The pencils got shorter and the pile of multicolored shavings on the desk got bigger and the voices did not stop.
Marie had gone to bed early. “Don’t stay up too late,” she had told Tess as she kissed her good night in front of the fireplace where Tess had been reading. Even then the voices had been warming up, but Tess kept reading for another hour or so until they became too much of a distraction. Then she said good night to Harry and Vivian—each in a chair with a book—and went to her room to arrange Legos, write alphabets, and sharpen pencils. Never had the voices been so demanding.
When the aquamarine pencil was nothing more than a nub, Tess crept out of her room, lurking in the shadows as she watched Harry and Vivian. They sat together on the sofa, close enough that their legs pressed into one another. Too close, thought Tess. They leaned slightly forward, their cheeks almost touching, and whispered words that Tess could not hear. But Tess understood the intonations of secrecy. And of intimacy. Whatever Harry and Vivian were discussing, they didn’t want Tess to know. Or Marie.
Tess loved Vivian like a second mother, but she loved Marie, too. She didn’t like Harry and Vivian having secrets from her mother. Especially when those secrets involved sitting so close to each other in the dying light of a fire. Tess tiptoed back to her room and slid under the covers, praying for sleep. Thunder began to rumble outside, and she considered closing her window against the coming rain, but the fresh air soothed her. Besides, if the rain blew in the window maybe it would wash away all the pencil shavings and in the morning the voices, and all evidence of their existence, would be gone.
Tess drifted in and out of sleep, twice awakened by a boom of thunder. Lightning flashed, but the rain still did not come, heightening her nervous anticipation. It felt as if the world was holding back, letting the pressure build until the release would be catastrophic. The third time she awoke, she got out of bed and looked out the window. Harry and Vivian, laden with blankets and what the lightning revealed to be Harry’s antique radio, were walking toward the woods, Harry unspooling a long orange extension cord behind him. Why in the world would they take the radio outside when it could start pouring rain at any moment? Harry loved that radio. He dusted it every day and never let anyone else touch it. It could be ruined in a rainstorm.
Tess watched the bouncing beam of Vivian’s flashlight and when that beam stilled and she realized where Harry had taken Vivian, she became more convinced than ever that they were about to do something that would tear her family apart.
Since the time she was four or five, Tess had been allowed full access to the island. The island was hers to explore, and explore it she did, learning its every rise and fall, befriending each tree and shrub, building miniature cairns out of smooth stones or crude shelters out of dead branches. The freedom to gain that intimacy had built Tess’s sense of independence—the true purpose, she suspected now, of her parents’ giving her the run of the place.
But one spot on the island had always been forbidden: A circle of trees a short distance to the north of the house surrounding a clearing about twenty feet wide. The trees were tall, slender pines ringed by laurel bushes which almost enclosed the space, leaving a gap on the side facing the house just wide enough for an adult to pass through. This clearing was Harry’s sanctum sanctorum—the one place on the island where not only Tess but also Marie and Vivian were forbidden to set foot. Harry himself only ventured into what he called his “private circle” occasionally. Sometimes a whole summer would pass without him slipping through the laurel bushes and disappearing for an hour or so.
But now, Tess watched as Harry led Vivian into his most private space and felt betrayed. There was no other word for it. Tess was Harry’s family, his flesh and blood, the rightful heir to the private circle. Marie was his wife, the person with whom he should share the most secret and intimate parts of himself. Yet here he was leading Vivian into the very place from which both Tess and her mother had been barred.
She watched as the flashlight moved around within the laurels and then heard, in between the claps of thunder, the sound of music coming from Harry’s radio. Romantic music, thought Tess. Some love song from the days when young men took their girlfriends to secret spots in the woods.
Tess felt a great pull inside herself, as if game of tug-of-war as wide as the universe passed its rope directly through her gut. “Under no circumstances should you ever set foot in my circle,” Harry had said, reiterating, “No circumstances.” But what if those circumstances were the possible implosion of the family that she loved: the destruction of her tender, kindhearted mother; the expulsion of one of her parents from the family home; a dagger in the heart of the friendship between Marie and Vivian; and the condemning of Tess to an adolescence of misery and a broken home? Weren’t those circumstances dire enough to lift the ban on setting foot on some meaningless piece of ground? Wasn’t saving her family a cause noble enough to justify defying her father?
Even as these questions tore at her, she saw the flashlight extinguished and she fell back into her desk chair. She was too late. In front of her, the uneven ends of her colored pencils stood silent witness to the fact that this was all Tess’s fault. If she had only obeyed the voices. They had told her something bad would happen. If she didn’t sharpen the pencils properly, something bad would happen. And she hadn’t sharpened the pencils properly and now her happy childhood was over, her family rent apart, and the man she had loved and trusted most in the world stood at the center of that betrayal. She threw her head down on the desk and cried, finally falling asleep in the chair to the smell of pencil shavings and the rumble of thunder.
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