A/S/L

A transformational, transformative story about video games, three queer friends, and the code(s) they learn to survive, from the winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Trans Fiction

1998: Lilith, Sash, and Abraxa are teenagers, scattered across the country but joined by the Internet as they create Saga of the Sorceress, a video game that will change everything, if only for the three of them.

Eighteen years later, Saga of the Sorceress still exists only on the scattered drives of its creators. Lilith works as a loan underwriter at a rinky-dink bank in Manhattan, a trans woman in a very cis world. Sash is in Brooklyn, working as a part-time webcam dominatrix. Neither knows that the other is in New York, or that Abraxa is just across the Hudson River, sleeping on the floor of a friend’s Jersey City home after a disaster at sea. They have never met in person and have been out of touch for years, but none have forgotten the sorceress or her unfinished quest.

Weaving together the technologies of two decades, and a healthy dose of magic, A/S/L is a novel that queers our notions of nostalgia, friendship, and even the possibilities of fiction itself, confirming Jeanne Thornton as one of our best and most ambitious novelists.

Jeanne Thornton is the author of the novel Summer Fun, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction, as well as the novel The Dream of Doctor Bantam and the collection The Black Emerald, both of which were shortlisted for Lambda Literary Awards. She is the editor, with Tara Madison Avery, of We’re Still Here: An All-Trans Comics Anthology, the copublisher of the independent press Instar Books, and the writer and illustrator of the webcomics Bad Mother and The Man Who Hates Fun. Her work has appeared in Wired, n+1, and The Evergreen Review.