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A corporate hacker. An elusive billionaire. A society trying to survive the American Nightmare. 

New York City, 2075. Filipino American Nick Carraway has just moved to the heart of the fractured New Americas, where he’s struck by the city’s contradictions—shining corporate towers casting bleak shadows over the slums of a crumbling middle class.

When Nick meets alluring, new-money Jay Gatsby, he falls for Gatsby’s frank charm and confident aura. But in a city where the wealthy flaunt tech-enhanced bodies to cheat death, surfaces aren’t all they seem—and as a corporate-sanctioned cyberspace hacker, Nick knows that no secret can stay buried forever. He’s the reason they don’t. And his latest assignment? Investigate Gatsby himself.

As Nick becomes entangled in the dark affairs of the elite—and the devastating fallout of their actions on the city’s most vulnerable—he must reckon with the limits of compassion and accountability across class and status. What takes Love or truth? Heart or soul?

A brilliant reimagining of Fitzgerald’s classic tale of glamour, desire, and desperation, Local Heavens examines the guardrails of morality . . . and the price of desire.

Don't just take our word for it...

“Easily one of my favorite books of the year. Fajardo’s Local Heavens is not just a cyberpunk reinvention of The Great Gatsby, but a singular revelation in its own right. Creative, incisive, and elegantly crafted, this one will wow you even as it wrecks you—you’ll be holding your breath to the end.”
– Olivie Blake, New York Times Bestselling Author of The Atlas Six

“Beautiful, intelligent, timely, and so much fun, Fajardo’s darkly futuristic reimagining of The Great Gatsby is imbued with a powerful appreciation for humanity and all of its flaws, whilst also maintaining an electric sense of building dread. In true sci-fi fashion, moral questions hover around the characters like vultures, and absolutely nothing is as it seems. I could not look away. A phenomenal new talent has entered the SFF space.”
– Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson, Sunday Times Bestselling Author of The Principle of Moments

“Gorgeous, decadent atmosphere. Local Heavens pierces to the core of an American classic, transforming the original Gatsby’s prosperity and prohibition into an era of technological dominance and the consequences therein. An exemplary execution of the cyberpunk genre.”
– Chloe Gong, New York Times Bestselling Author of Immortal Longings

Taste the very first page

The first time I left the insular suburban biodomes of Minnesota, my thoughts had drifted to my late father, who’d always carried the steadfast belief that every generation ought to live through some piece of grand history at least once.

“Ego is the soul killer,” he’d told me. “Humanity should know its smallness.”

My father had been shaped by this thought after a serendipitous night in his adolescence, when he’d switched on the television and seen a news report broadcasting the launch of a probe into deep space. The initiative had brought together about a hundred countries to curate a capsule of humanity’s finest accomplishments.

Later, in my own youth, I’d studied the event in school, but it was my father’s account that stuck with me most. This probe, holding the collected heart of an entire civilization, had disappeared like a speck of dust into the vast sky. To have witnessed it in real time could never truly be expressed in a history lesson, he’d insisted, and he’d come away from the experience with a solemn, cosmic hope for the future.

He’d lived long enough into the fifties to hear the latest up- date of the probe’s leaving the Milky Way, but a few years later, we lost its signal. Soon after, my father passed too.

September 2025