From the New York Times bestselling author of Enders Game comes a brand-new series following a teen who wakes up on an abandoned Earth to discover that he’s a clone!
Laz is a side-stepper: a teen with the incredible power to jump his consciousness to alternate versions of himself in parallel worlds. All his life, there was no mistake that a little side-stepping couldn’t fix.
Until Laz wakes up one day in a cloning facility on a seemingly abandoned Earth.
Laz finds himself surrounded by hundreds of other clones, all dead, and quickly realizes that he too must be a clone of his original self. Laz has no idea what happened to the world he remembers as vibrant and bustling only yesterday, and he struggles to survive in the barren wasteland he’s now trapped in. But the question that haunts him isn’t why was he created, but instead, who woke him up... and why?
There’s only a single bright spot in Laz’s new life: one other clone appears to still be alive, although she remains asleep. Deep down, Laz believes that this girl holds the key to the mysteries plaguing him, but if he wakes her up, she’ll be trapped in this hellscape with him.
This is one problem that Laz can’t just side-step his way out of.
The series
In a world where identity is no longer bound by a single timeline, The Side-Step Trilogy bends reality into a question: what if every version of you still existed—and you could take their place?
Read full series description
This quietly mind-bending series begins with Wakers, where teenage Laz discovers he can "side-step" into alternate versions of himself in parallel worlds. It’s not a flashy superpower; it’s a terrifying escape hatch—one he pulls only when life becomes unbearable. But when Laz wakes up in a cloning facility surrounded by hundreds of motionless copies of himself, the rules of his ability, and the very nature of his identity, begin to fracture.
As the trilogy unfolds, it doesn't just leap across dimensions—it digs deep into what makes a person whole. Each book builds on the unsettling tension between autonomy and design, freedom and fate. In Reawakening, Laz confronts the consequences of tampering with timelines, not just for himself, but for the fragile, overlapping realities he's begun to unravel.
What makes the trilogy so compelling isn’t just its multiverse premise or speculative science fiction edge—it’s the haunting quiet between the chaos. The loneliness of a boy who doesn’t know which version of himself is real. The ethical unease of borrowed lives. The slow realization that some doors, once opened, can’t be closed again.
With the precision and psychological weight readers expect from the author of Ender’s Game, this series trades space battles for internal ones, asking not how far we can travel, but how far we’re willing to go to escape ourselves. The Side-Step Trilogy isn't loud—but it lingers.
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