Sea of Tranquility meets Dark Matter in this dizzying speculative thriller following a clan of Neanderthals living in isolation on a nature reserve and the scientists who care for them.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from The Shadows Tomorrow by Noëlle Michel, which releases August 4th 2026.
A clan of humans—they hunt and gather, they have lovers and rivals, their own society. They pass on the legends of their ancestors and celebrate festival nights. Their world is the forest which feeds them, and, aside from the fierce cold and illness, the only thing they have to fear is the Beast who prowls the impassable Bounds. They do not know that beyond it an entirely different world exists: our world.
Set in the near future, the Neanderthal race has been recreated from fragments of DNA and reintroduced on a nature reserve where they are observed and studied, ultimately becoming the subjects of a hit documentary series. Following a cast of characters across time: Blood Moon, the leader of the Neanderthal clan who is mourning the death of her partner, Blizzard; Eva and Noah, scientists in modern-day Paris hired to work on a top-secret project; Jules, a teenager growing up in a secluded mountain town with a suspiciously pronounced brow; Adam, an actor brought to appear on NeanderTales for the first time; and finally, the man behind the project—but is he Sapien or Neanderthal?
A reeling suspense novel with shocking surprises that also sheds light on our ethical and moral considerations in and out of nature, showing the other human we could have been, The Shadows Tomorrow will grip you until the very end.
EXCERPT
“We are a way for the universe to know itself. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return. And we can, because the cosmos is also within us. We’re made of star stuff.”
CARL SAGAN
THERE EXISTS A PLACE, intimate and precious, where one is no longer one, where all are but one. Where differences are erased, otherness dissipates, boundaries disappear. Where the individual disappears to the benefit of the whole, the body melts into space, where its physical sheath is full of holes. She becomes aware that she is porous, no longer an object with hermetic boundaries, separate from the world, but a constellation of dust permeated by the void, a tide, a current, that mingles with other currents—water, wind, heat, the fusion of breaths, the communion of flesh.
Could she one day go back there, to this place she can sense but cannot put into words? Such are the thoughts that flicker through her as she waits. As if to reassure her, the young man flashes her a smile, revealing a line of teeth that are very sharp, very white. She could stare at them forever. They look like pearls of snow, recollections of her lost happiness—then suddenly she is on her feet, her every sense on alert.
“They’re coming!”
“But I don’t hear anything.” She smiles. The human does not possess a fraction of her visual and auditory perception, and his sense of smell is poorer still. Is it because they are so physically different? He is taller, paler and scrawnier, like the other strange humans. They look as though a goddess took their head in one hand, feet in the other, and then stretched them.
“Come,” she whispers.
She leaps down from a boulder.
“This way.”
She sets off across the dusty ground, beckoning for him to follow. Moved by a sudden impulse, she stops before a cave painting bathed in the flickering glow of a torch thrust into a crack. She bends to pick up the bowl of linden wood filled with reddish mud. They must hurry, but she wishes to leave a last vestige of their encounter, of their meeting, like a farewell to the cave, to her world, which is fast disappearing. Quickly she plunges her right hand into the crimson mud, then presses her palm against the cave wall. When she pulls away, the dark red imprint remains, dreamlike in the quivering flame. Without a word, she hands him the vessel. He in turn reaches a hesitant hand into the mud, then presses it against the rock face, twining the imprint of his slender fingers with hers. The woman strokes his cheek, leaving a soft smear of ochre on the skin, then takes his hand and sets off at a run. He darts after her and they weave between rocks and clamber over others. Soon the glow of the torch is no more than a memory.
She does not let go of his hand; she knows every crack and crevice of this cave and can get her bearings from the walls and the muffled echoes of their footsteps, but she knows that, without her, the young man is lost. They move through the darkness. The woman vaguely realizes her life might end here—hers and his, the two of them together in the darkness. She feels no fear. Not yet. Heading this way, the path that leads outside is much longer. The man whim pers, pulls her back; he has grazed himself on the rock face. Nothing serious. They move on. She feels as though she is delving into the bowels of the earth. The air grows cooler, the darkness thicker, the passage narrower. The woman hesitates. The contours of the rock, the sharp twists and turns, feel familiar. She sniffs the cold air of the cave. Did she dream it? Could it be the fear seeping into her, obstructing her breath, or did she catch a whiff of that lingering, unnatural odor, the vile emanations of the Beast? She grips the man’s hand more tightly.
“What is happening? Why did you stop? Are we . . . are we lost?” he whispers anxiously.
She lays a finger on his lips to urge him to be silent. For a moment they stand there in the darkness, still as stones. They can hear no sound of their pursuers. Despite the pitch blackness, the woman closes her eyes. She opens every fiber of her body to the sounds and smells around them. Beads of sweat form at her temples. The shadows’ exhalations brush her face like the icy breath of a grave. It thickens into a dense cloud that envelops them. A tainted, loath some, deadly cloud. She holds her breath. Is this the end? Has the Beast come for them? The woman slips her hands into the bag that is tied to her loincloth and, as though to conjure the Beast, she strokes the talisman within, a little cross of grayish metal to which is nailed a human effigy. The man and the woman are panting for breath now. Lost in the darkness, they tighten their grip, crushing their fingers as they cling to what binds them to humanity, to life.
