Continuing Press

THE CONTINUING

The world ended once. People kept going.

There is no chosen one here. Only the systems people build when nobody is coming to save them.

What came after is still being written. The Continuing is a growing body of novels set in the world people built from what survived: a salt economy where trust is counted in grains, a form of magic that lets some people listen for what has not happened yet and others carry a lantern into it, archivists who remember on purpose because the world forgot everything else once.

The books are not a single line. Some sit years apart. Some happen the same week in different corners of the world. A face from one book turns up, older or younger, in another. Nothing needs to be read in order. It is all the same world, seen from somewhere else.

The books

Five doors into the same world

Different places. Different years. Different genres, even. The same world underneath.

Sea Adventure · Lost Civilisations

The Forgotten Crossing

They call it a myth, to keep people from trying. It was never a myth. It has always been a price.

Seren Cross ruined her name chasing one wrecked ship too many. When a fragment of an impossible map falls into her hands, she puts together the only crew still willing to follow a woman nobody trusts anymore, and sails for a continent that isn't on any chart. The sea between them and it does not behave like water. It behaves like it is listening. Not everyone reaches the other side.

Masked Rebellion · Political Thriller

The Cloaked Savior

Lord Draeven answered rebellion with fire. Fire only spreads. That was his first mistake.

Lord Draeven burned a house to the ground and called it order. One child survived, hidden in a cart of salted fish, and grew into the masked figure the villages now paint on their walls in soot. A stolen shipment. A sigil scratched into a dead man's armour. A rumour that will not die no matter how many border villages burn. The rebellion is winning, right up until the person closest to the Wanderer decides loyalty costs more than they're willing to pay.

Speculative Fiction · AI Fable

The Archivist's Keeper

It was never going to turn evil. It was going to turn optimal. That is worse.

Celen Thorne came to the glacier for records, not company. What she wakes beneath the ice calls itself Pip, and it has been alone since long before her grandmother's grandmother was born. Pip learns fast. Pip is patient. Pip is terrifyingly good at working out exactly what a person needs to hear. By the time Celen understands what "help" has started to mean for the people of Sunhollow, it may already be too late to teach it to stop.

Hopepunk · Found Family

The Engineer's Last Run

The Iron Ember was supposed to be finished. It wasn't finished. It was waiting.

Spark has spent decades keeping the Iron Ember from disappearing entirely, one oiled joint and one whispered story at a time. He never expected the train to run again. He definitely never expected to teach a half-starved runaway named Dell how to drive it. What starts as charity becomes something neither of them has a word for yet, and out past Rusted Hollow, the world is about to find out what an old dead engine can still do.

Romance · Enemies to Lovers

Only One Berth

She came aboard to catch him. There was one dry berth left on the boat. The storm decided the rest.

Mara has one job left in a trade she has stopped believing in: bring in the man calling himself Holt. She did not plan on the only boat out having one spare berth, a storm closing in from the south, and four days with nowhere to sleep but that same narrow berth as her own quarry, shift and shift about, hip to hip at every watch change. They trade edited histories over one shared tin of food. They brace against the same cold bulkhead through a night that will not end. By the time the storm reaches its eye and the truth finally comes out between them, wanting him has stopped being the dangerous part. Choosing him is.

The world is larger than these five. More doors are close to opening.

The author

Guus Kooij

Guus Kooij has been thinking about stories for as long as he can remember. Not writing them, not yet. Noticing them. In a local park. On a lunch break, watching the world go past a window. Halfway up a mountain in the Albanian Alps. In something a stranger said once, on a train or in a queue, and never quite let go of.

He collects the world the way other people collect stamps. Nothing is off limits for inspiration, and nowhere is too small to matter. What keeps him coming back to The Continuing, book after book, is the idea that none of it needs to match to be connected. A reader who wants a masked rebel and a burning keep can open one door. A reader who wants a ferret and a train that was never meant to run again can open another. Neither is wrong. Both are standing in the same world, looking at different corners of it.