Parallels

by James Kinsley

FROM THE FINALIST FOR THE 2023 PAGE TURNER AWARDS

"THE MATRIX" MEETS THE FOREVER WAR IN JAMES KINSLEY'S BREATHTAKING SCI-FI ACTION ADVENTURE

Two worlds. One mind. Endless uncertainty.

Jeff is stuck in the mundane now, drifting through aimless days and gnawing doubts. Until the moment he sees the Pale Woman—and reality shifts. Suddenly, he’s Jezz, a mercenary trapped in a savage conflict, battling swarms of alien insects on a war-torn front line.

Is he a restless young man just scraping by, or a desperate soldier risking everything for humanity’s survival? As identities collide, one question rips through his fractured psyche:

What is reality?

Genres: Science Fiction

210 pages, Hardcover

First published May 22, 2025

About the author

James Kinsley lives in Thorpe Hamlet. His latest book, It's Hard to Tell You This, a novella of regret, is out now from Deixis Press.

Playtime's Over, his first book, was published in 2021 by Propolis and is about a young man on the edge, struggling to deal with his mental health issues in the face of a world he feels no longer cares.

With Deixis Press, he has published the fantasy western Greyskin and the science-fiction thriller Parallels.

He also publishes sci-fi adventures under the name Ray Adams.

Reviews

[A.M. Belsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

James Kinsley’s books are always so thought-provoking, and this one is no exception! Ordinary Jeff is struggling through his day-to-day life in England, unsure about his purpose or future, when suddenly his consciousness shifts and he is Jezz, mercenary fighter in a far-flung war against alien insect invaders. Jezz is as real as Jeff is as real as Jezz … and he isn’t sure where reality ends and fantasy begins. Absolutely captivating throughout—and highly recommended for those who are already Kinsley fans as well as those who have not yet had the pleasure.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book focuses on Jeff, a guy who’s been going through a tough time and suffering with his mental health, and Jezz, a volunteer soldier fighting against an alien invasion in China. To be honest, I could quite happily have read a book just about Jeff and his efforts to recover and build new relationships / rebuild existing ones. I found him and his family (plus Sal) all relatable and warm characters.

The story regularly switches between Jeff and Jezz - each is suffering blackouts while conscious as the other person. It’s an interesting concept, especially towards the end when each starts to question which one of them is ‘real’ and which is the hallucination. I found the Jezz storyline a bit less compelling than Jeff (probably just because I’m not that keen on war and fighting generally) but they both held my attention and I didn’t want to put the book down.

I won’t give full spoilers but there was a massive twist at the end which caused me to finish the book with a lot of questions. Which is not necessarily a bad thing! There would certainly be plenty to discuss if reading this book with a book group. I was a tad disappointed that I didn’t get to find out what happened to the characters I’d been reading about, but there is lots to speculate on and the author potentially leaves things open for a sequel exploring the new world and characters that are introduced in the final chapter.

Generally I found the book very enjoyable and thought provoking. It is well written and the language was at the right level for me to understand without having to re-read sentences or get my thesaurus out! I will definitely seek out more of James Kinsley’s books to read in future.

[Paul Grenyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Parallels is an interesting and enjoyable read. It kept me guessing about what was actually going on the whole time. A sense of the something more I am missing always keeps me engaged, and I wasn’t expecting the twist until it came, or the final twist in the last sentence.

As a software engineer who is awkward around people, I could immediately relate to Jeff, and this drew me right in. Conversely I couldn’t really understand Jezz volunteering to go to war and sticking it out. I think these two extremes made it a much better story, for me, than it would have been otherwise.

However, I could have done without the constant smoking by the characters, I don’t really see what this brings. James needs to work on his sex scenes, especially the language used. I would have liked to know more about why the platinum blonde was trying to get through to Jeff - maybe I missed it. There were still a handful of unanswered questions, reasons and background by the end; I would have liked to see these explained.

At a couple of hundred pages, this is an easy read and I would recommend it. I’m already looking forward to James’ next book - no pressure James - and hopefully it will have more depth and breadth and less smoking!

[Amy Orrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

A thought-provoking read, exploring male mental health on the one hand, and the harsh realities of war on the other, and how family and friendship allow the protagonists to navigate the challenges of both. The conclusion generates as many questions as it answers and would make it a great subject for a bookclub discussion! I have a feeling that the characters have more to tell...

[Jacqueline Nyathi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jezz and Jeff are the same guy living through two completely different experiences: one is in the present, kind of watching his life fall apart in slow motion; the other is a future soldier in a very chaotic world. It’s a novel that felt to me like an allegory about mental health: Maybe Jeff and Jezz are two manifestations of a person with dissociative identity disorder? I like that idea.

It’s great that Kinsley tackles such big concepts, but this one didn’t really work for me, for the following reasons:
- The smoking. Gosh. There is a crazy amount of smoking in this novel… And it’s not just that I hate it when characters smoke (although I do), but it felt like either a repetitive writing tic or, if I’m being somewhat generous, a crutch that maybe meant to be shorthand for something. I bet if those references were removed, Kinsley could have saved at least ten pages, or possibly more. And because I know how blind an author often gets to this kind of thing, I feel an editor should have picked it up. If it was deliberate—and maybe it was, to show Jeff/Jezz’s deterioration—it didn’t come across clearly enough for me.
- I really couldn’t connect with either Jezz or Jeff (mostly Jeff), although I became quite intrigued with Jezz’s world. I’m a bit iffy about where that’s set and why—China—because I’m not completely sure if it adds anything to the narrative. There were references to troops from other places, but mostly in negative ways—again, not sure why unless it was xenophobia on the part of the MCs. In other words, could be a cool idea, but we can’t know because it wasn’t fleshed out. So—
- I know it’s not the done thing to review the novel that wasn’t, but: I wonder if this novel could have benefitted from a lot more time and most of the focus on building Jezz’s world, with a reveal much later that it’s possible Jeff is hallucinating and/or dissociating. In other words, a much fuller exploration of that future war and all of the things it’s doing to Jezz. I know that as things stand, it’s hard to know whose reality is real—Jezz's or Jeff’s—and that’s a hook, but I think Kinsley could have strengthened the writing on the more interesting “reality” without losing that feeling of unbalancing the reader.

So, an interesting read with some cool subtext, but I wanted more.

Thanks to Deixis Press and NetGalley for DRC access.

[Brian · Rating 1 out of 5]

This review is based on an ARC copy from NetGalley.

This book is an absolute mess. There's an interesting story somewhere in here, but it's bogged down by endless repetition and an ending that doesn't answer any questions. The story revolves around a man who seems to be trapped between living in two different worlds. In one world, he's Jezz, a gunner in an army platoon fighting against an alien invasion of Earth by a group of creatures called the Elty'ch. In the other world, he's Jeff, who's basically just some guy going through what seems to be a mental breakdown. Jeff moves in with his step- mother and sister who help take care of him. (Side note: he has a weirdly intimate relationship with his sister—nothing overtly sexual, but the physical affection between the two of them is a bit off-putting for siblings, even if they’re not biologically related.) He also meets a woman named Sal with whom he forms a romantic bond. Right before Jezz/Jeff passes out and switches realities, he sees a hooded pale woman who says something cryptic to him.

End of book and general plot spoilers:
In the final chapter, we're suddenly following Dr. Soong, a scientist living on a space station orbiting Earth. We learn that Earth is uninhabitable, seemingly taken over by another ice age. Hundreds of space stations are orbiting around it and every other possible planet and moon in the solar system. Each of these stations hold hundreds of capsules, each containing a human in stasis. The scientists who are living on the stations and not in stasis have been working on a way to keep the stasis humans asleep longer without waking up. Their goal seems to be to keep them asleep indefinitely until they can find or create a habitable living environment for everyone (it's explained that attempts at previous habitats have failed). Everyone on Soong's station seems to correlate with someone in Jezz/Jeff's realities, and at the very end, Soong and his colleagues are forced to wake up a capsule inhabitant--a pale young woman named Jess.

My issues with this book are from both a story perspective and a technical one. From a story perspective, this book literally ends with the "it was all a dream" trope, which means that all the events leading up to the final chapter didn't actually matter. Which reality was real? Neither. Is Jess the pale woman that Jezz/Jeff kept seeing? Maybe. But if that's the case, does that mean Jess was dreaming of herself as two different men in two different worlds, and each of those men were also seeing Jess herself, who kept telling those men to wake up? None of this makes much sense, but more aggravatingly, none of it actually matters.

Every time the pale woman showed up in a Jezz/Jeff chapter, I kept hoping I would actually learn something to move the plot forward, but all the story did was keep repeating the same thing over and over: Jezz/Jeff wakes up in their world, does some stuff, sees the pale woman, passes out, and wakes up in the other world. This is lazy storytelling, and the book could have been cut down by 75% and nothing would have been lost since we don’t actually learn anything about the real person involved in these realities: Jess.

Then there are the technical issues. There were boundless typos throughout the book, but countless times I also ran into a word or phrase where I couldn't tell if it was a typo or if it was simply a saying used in UK English that isn't used in American English. An example of the terrible proofreading was on page 104 (Kindle edition), after Jezz kills an alien and is examining it up close for the first time. He realizes that the alien's upper limbs were ineffectual for hand-to-hand combat, and the author writes, "Either the angle was wrong, or the damned thing was just too weak, but what blows it was landing were negligible." I read that sentence at least five times and I still have no clue what it's supposed to mean.

Another annoyance is that the Kindle version I read didn't have navigable chapters. The book itself has chapters, but on the Kindle the entire story is just one long chapter that doesn’t allow you to skip back and forth. And because the actual book chapters are incredibly long, I never had any idea how much longer I had to read until I could find a good stopping point. This led to me having to stop in the middle of a chapter rather than at a natural break. This can be easily fixed in the electronic file, and it really should be before official publication.

Overall, this was just a very frustrating read from start to finish. I can’t recommend reading it.

[READER VIEWS · Rating 5 out of 5]

All these centuries. Man has wrestled with the possibility of life in other parts of the galaxy probably ever since they first looked up and saw stars. All the crazies, all the two-bit scientists, all the supposed eyewitnesses kept shouting that we weren’t alone. But no one was really sure. We had our unequivocal answer in one day, and the world was suddenly at war for its very existence. Nine months ago, a race called the Eltiy’ch made themselves known. And called for an immediate extermination of the parasites on Earth known as humans.

Millions are dead, and more die every day. We’re literally in a fight for our lives, and we’re losing. The world’s militaries have been so decimated that they are accepting help from any able body. That’s where Jezz and his tank team come in. They’re volunteers and mercenaries from different places who have come to the current hotspot, Sichuan, China, to fight these ugly bugs and wipe them out before humanity is a goner. The four-person team is made up of Price, the tank commander, Teemu, a first-rate tank driver, Nora, and Jezz.

As they engage the bug-ugly enemy, their tank is hit with a phero-grenade; a gas-type device that isn’t well understood, except it’s nearly always lethal. Jezz doesn’t get his gas mask on in time and takes a massive dose of the gas. As if Jezz’s world wasn’t already high on the FUBAR scale, this gas attack is going to create a whole new level of trauma.

Jezz wakes up in a hospital. Not a military field hospital where you can still hear the battle raging, and the medical procedures are minimal. He’s in a civilian hospital, and it’s quiet. No war, no Eltiy’ch, no phero-grenade. Life just went from all kinds of crazy to insane in the blink of an eye. Here, he’s Jeff, a programmer who’s been placed on leave by his boss. He’s a loner and a hermit without any friends. He has minimal family, which he wrote off years ago. But his stubborn and angry half-sister Anoush refuses to leave him alone.

Jezz/Jeff take readers on a high-speed, tension-filled journey as each seems to enter the other’s world, mind, and body. Both believe the other person is the fiction: call it a nightmare, psychosis, parallel dimension, whatever. The only harbinger that warns them another episode is imminent is the appearance of a tall, pale woman with short white hair. Sometimes she watches him, and sometimes she speaks, warning him that it is not what it seems. No kidding, lady. But which part? Is Jezz the real person, and he’s seeking safety in the “life” of a quiet man? Or is Jeff real, and creating Jezz’s world to give himself a sense of purpose?

For the first time, a horrifying question formulated in Jezz’s mind –was he absolutely sure that this was reality, that he wasn’t the psychosis?

Yeesh. This will mess with your head in that great way science fiction can do. There’s a stark duality here as we transition frequently from a war-torn, dying world to a more “normal” world where one man struggles with mental health. The characters here (in both worlds) are well constructed and complex. They’re flawed yet mostly likable, although Anoush’s rough demeanor takes some getting used to. They’re simply people. What better praise could there be for a cast of characters?

The plot moves us smoothly from the nightmare of Jezz’s war-torn reality to the pure despair of Jeff’s perceived mental illness in a world we recognize. Kinsley flawlessly executes these exchanges in a way that keeps readers hanging onto every page.

As with the interweaving of lives, the themes likewise stitch their own patterns. Readers will find themes of loyalty, strength, family, and hope alongside despair, anguish, and a challenge to the notion of free will. This is top-notch storytelling, whip-smart and engaging from ground zero to the out-of-the-blue ending that promises more to come (I hope).

Parallels by James Kinsley will have readers questioning reality. This is perfect for readers of science fiction, psychological thrillers loaded with action, apocalyptic novels, and those who enjoy rolling concepts around in their minds. Fans of The Matrix series, Permutation City, or The Forever War, and tales involving mind-bending concepts, will thoroughly enjoy this story.

[Dylan West · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book gets deep into the minds of the protagonists and shows vivid character interactions. He makes lots of little observations I found immersive, and the writing style is sharp. The action slows in the middle, but everything else was so good that I didn’t mind. Lot’s of romance in here, too, quite spicy, so this isn’t for young readers. If you want something different in sci-fi, I’d check this out.

[Matt · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was a great book until the final chapter, which utterly ruins it. I'm sorry, but you don't get to rug pull and try a twist like that after building up two very good plot lines. The publisher should strike the final chapter and send it back for revision.

Thanks for the ARC. No thanks for the awful ending.

[Maria Beltrami · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jeff, Jezz, or...? The narrative seems to be based on a serious case of dissociative identity disorder, with the protagonist switching seamlessly from one to the other. Except that Jeff is a peaceful nerd with relationship problems, while Jezz is a fighter in a hopeless war against invading aliens. Each of the two personalities appears accompanied by their own setting. So is it really a case of identity disorder, or is the narrative about something else? And who is the mysterious blonde woman who appears just before the protagonist switches from one identity to another?
Although it is very well written and keeps the reader glued to the pages, the novel has some structural problems, and above all, the ending comes across as a bit of a deus ex machina, as if the author no longer knew how to extricate himself from his own narrative skill.

[Mirko Unipan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very good read. The struggle of Jeff/Jezz to make sense of what’s happening to him, which of the two lives is the real one and which one is a hallucination really grips you.Ive enjoyed also the more emotional aspects of the two ‘realities’, the worry of ‘Jezz’ that he’s letting down his squad mates when he slips into the other realm, and the struggle of Jeff believing he’s going mad and causing pain to his loved ones in the other life. The secondary characters were also very well depicted, both the squad in the war as the stepsister and mother of Jeff in the timeline closer to ours. I get the criticism of other reviewers about the ending being too neat, I’d also have preferred a more open-ended one that doesn’t ‘solve’ the mistery in such a clear-cut way, nonetheless I still enjoyed the book a lot and is a very good read.