THE OFFLINE YEARS
Adult coming-of-age fiction set in Bulgaria before smartphones, social media, and permanent evidence.
On a crumbling Bulgarian Black Sea coast, a gang of kids spend the last analog summers of their lives turning bad decisions into legend, and one of them spends the next thirty years trying to understand what they cost.
The series follows Nikolay Markov from a seaside town in Bulgaria into adulthood, before smartphones, before social media, before every mistake was uploaded. It is adult coming-of-age fiction about friendship, risk, first love, and consequences, and across a life it asks one question: when is risk freedom, and when is it escape?
On a fading stretch of the Bulgarian Black Sea coast, in the last years before everyone carried a screen, a boy grows up inside his parents' computer club, where time is sold by the hour and status is won and lost among humming machines.
Nikolay can read a room, a system, a price, and the rules of every game around him. Everything except the girl whose attention he keeps getting wrong.
Before every mistake had a camera, every legend needed witnesses.
Next in the series
About the author
Martin Kostov grew up on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast and has spent his working life on the other side of the machines this book remembers. He now lives in Sofia. The Circus Money is his first novel.
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