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Koru: A Biography of Survival
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A novel without heroes. A record without mercy.Somewhere in the Middle Pleistocene, a valley is choosing who stays.
Koru is a tracker. His people call him by the word for noticing because he performs the act with a precision his group cannot afford to lose. He reads terrain, game, fire sign, water, and the slow arithmetic of survival the way other men breathe — without deciding to, without stopping.
The valley they have entered is already occupied.
The ones already there are not enemies. They cook. They read sign. They grieve. They shelter their young and ration their old and make fires that burn through the night. They are doing exactly what Koru's people are doing, in the same valley, after the same game, through the same narrowing season.
There is not room for both.
Koru is a novel about what happens in the space before violence — the long, quiet displacement that requires no cruelty and leaves no monument. It follows one man's attempt to read a world that is changing in ways no individual caused and no individual can stop.
Written in the tradition of William Golding's The Inheritors and Hilary Mantel's documentary precision, Koru renders the end of the Neanderthals not as conquest but as arithmetic — and refuses to let either side be wrong.
For readers historical fictionPrehistoric and paleoanthropological narrativeCharacter studies told through action rather than interiorityFiction that asks hard questions without providing comfortable answersThe displacement was not the victory of the better over the worse. It was the slower yielding to the faster, in a valley that could not hold both.
A novel without heroes. A record without mercy.Somewhere in the Middle Pleistocene, a valley is choosing who stays.
Koru is a tracker. His people call him by the word for noticing because he performs the act with a precision his group cannot afford to lose. He reads terrain, game, fire sign, water, and the slow arithmetic of survival the way other men breathe — without deciding to, without stopping.
The valley they have entered is already occupied.
The ones already there are not enemies. They cook. They read sign. They grieve. They shelter their young and ration their old and make fires that burn through the night. They are doing exactly what Koru's people are doing, in the same valley, after the same game, through the same narrowing season.
There is not room for both.
Koru is a novel about what happens in the space before violence — the long, quiet displacement that requires no cruelty and leaves no monument. It follows one man's attempt to read a world that is changing in ways no individual caused and no individual can stop.
Written in the tradition of William Golding's The Inheritors and Hilary Mantel's documentary precision, Koru renders the end of the Neanderthals not as conquest but as arithmetic — and refuses to let either side be wrong.
For readers historical fictionPrehistoric and paleoanthropological narrativeCharacter studies told through action rather than interiorityFiction that asks hard questions without providing comfortable answersThe displacement was not the victory of the better over the worse. It was the slower yielding to the faster, in a valley that could not hold both.
241 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 31, 2026
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