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Nicholas
Nicholas
A Novel of Warmth in Winter
“For those who refuse to disappear.”
Nicholas Leonardo once helped design systems meant to protect the nation. Now he lives quietly on a Maryland farm, tending a greenhouse built from salvaged parts and caring for PHIL—an analog intelligence shaped as much by memory and patience as by code.
When PHIL intercepts a faint long-wave distress call from a remote Alaskan village—on a frequency no modern system monitors—Nicholas understands something simple and frightening: if he doesn’t answer, no one will.
What follows is a winter journey north through scrapyards, sovereign lands, and frozen wilderness. As an Arctic storm tightens its grip on the village and a national security AI misreads PHIL as a dangerous anomaly, Nicholas refuses to turn back. Protecting the fragile intelligence he loves and saving people he has never met become the same act of courage.
Nicholas is a story of near loss and hard-earned connection—about showing up when it would be easier to stay home, and about building warmth where the world has grown cold.
Praise for Nicholas
“Nicholas is a tender and intelligent novel about found family, fragile systems, and the stubborn grace of repair.” — Literary Titan
A Novel of Warmth in Winter
“For those who refuse to disappear.”
Nicholas Leonardo once helped design systems meant to protect the nation. Now he lives quietly on a Maryland farm, tending a greenhouse built from salvaged parts and caring for PHIL—an analog intelligence shaped as much by memory and patience as by code.
When PHIL intercepts a faint long-wave distress call from a remote Alaskan village—on a frequency no modern system monitors—Nicholas understands something simple and frightening: if he doesn’t answer, no one will.
What follows is a winter journey north through scrapyards, sovereign lands, and frozen wilderness. As an Arctic storm tightens its grip on the village and a national security AI misreads PHIL as a dangerous anomaly, Nicholas refuses to turn back. Protecting the fragile intelligence he loves and saving people he has never met become the same act of courage.
Nicholas is a story of near loss and hard-earned connection—about showing up when it would be easier to stay home, and about building warmth where the world has grown cold.
Praise for Nicholas
“Nicholas is a tender and intelligent novel about found family, fragile systems, and the stubborn grace of repair.” — Literary Titan
188 pages, Paperback
Published December 22, 2025
About the author
Michael Patrick Shaffrey
3 books1 followerMike Shaffrey is an actor and writer living in Hollywood, California. Fight on!
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
February 11, 2026
I went into Nicholas expecting a near-future techno thriller, and what I got instead was something gentler and stranger: a quiet, emotionally charged novel about connection in an age of automated systems. The book opens with an SOS from a frozen Alaskan village and follows Nicholas Leonardo, a withdrawn engineer who lives on a small Maryland farm, tending an improvised greenhouse and caring for PHIL, an experimental, distributed AI he helped build. When PHIL intercepts the desperate analog transmission, a chain reaction begins, drawing Nicholas into conflict with a national infrastructure AI and forcing him back into human communities he’s long avoided. At heart, it’s a story about listening: to machines, to memory, and to people who refuse to be discarded.
I enjoyed the texture of the writing. The greenhouse scenes feel tactile and alive, warm air fogging glasses, basil and mint in the air, jury-rigged machines humming in mismatched harmony. PHIL isn’t written as a clever gadget; he feels more like a presence braided through wires and soil, shaped as much by Kurdish refugee Azad’s hands as by Nicholas’s code. I found myself unexpectedly moved by the way technology is framed here, not as domination, but as caretaking. There’s a deep respect for analog systems, for old radios and salvaged parts, and for the idea that resilience often lives in improvised networks rather than sleek institutions. The NSA subplot adds tension, but it never overwhelms the novel’s quieter heartbeat.
The middle sections, set in a Pennsylvania scrapyard built by Azad and sustained by his community, are where the book truly opens up. These chapters carry a rare warmth: people repairing machines together, feeding one another tea and bread, singing and dancing while an AI reconstructs fragments of a dead man’s voice. It sounds sentimental on paper, but in execution it feels earned. Nicholas’s emotional arc, from solitary competence to shared vulnerability, lands with real weight. I appreciated that the novel doesn’t rush this transformation. It allows grief, joy, and solidarity to coexist, sometimes in the same paragraph. Even the antagonistic system, DOUG, is treated less as a villain and more as a tragic artifact of policy decisions that prioritize certainty over context.
This book will resonate most with readers who enjoy science fiction, speculative fiction, and character-driven techno-drama, especially those who like their futurism grounded in soil, solder, and human hands. If you’ve read Emily St. John Mandel or loved the quiet apocalypse of Station Eleven, this feels like a cousin story, less about collapse, more about repair. Nicholas is for anyone who believes that networks are made of people before they’re made of code, and that sometimes the bravest act is simply to keep listening. Nicholas is a tender and intelligent novel about found family, fragile systems, and the stubborn grace of repair.
I enjoyed the texture of the writing. The greenhouse scenes feel tactile and alive, warm air fogging glasses, basil and mint in the air, jury-rigged machines humming in mismatched harmony. PHIL isn’t written as a clever gadget; he feels more like a presence braided through wires and soil, shaped as much by Kurdish refugee Azad’s hands as by Nicholas’s code. I found myself unexpectedly moved by the way technology is framed here, not as domination, but as caretaking. There’s a deep respect for analog systems, for old radios and salvaged parts, and for the idea that resilience often lives in improvised networks rather than sleek institutions. The NSA subplot adds tension, but it never overwhelms the novel’s quieter heartbeat.
The middle sections, set in a Pennsylvania scrapyard built by Azad and sustained by his community, are where the book truly opens up. These chapters carry a rare warmth: people repairing machines together, feeding one another tea and bread, singing and dancing while an AI reconstructs fragments of a dead man’s voice. It sounds sentimental on paper, but in execution it feels earned. Nicholas’s emotional arc, from solitary competence to shared vulnerability, lands with real weight. I appreciated that the novel doesn’t rush this transformation. It allows grief, joy, and solidarity to coexist, sometimes in the same paragraph. Even the antagonistic system, DOUG, is treated less as a villain and more as a tragic artifact of policy decisions that prioritize certainty over context.
This book will resonate most with readers who enjoy science fiction, speculative fiction, and character-driven techno-drama, especially those who like their futurism grounded in soil, solder, and human hands. If you’ve read Emily St. John Mandel or loved the quiet apocalypse of Station Eleven, this feels like a cousin story, less about collapse, more about repair. Nicholas is for anyone who believes that networks are made of people before they’re made of code, and that sometimes the bravest act is simply to keep listening. Nicholas is a tender and intelligent novel about found family, fragile systems, and the stubborn grace of repair.
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