Amabel's Children is a razor-sharp, unsettling, and darkly hypnotic novel that bends reality, memory, and identity into a single, spiraling question: What does it mean to be born for an audience?
Gregory J. Wolos delivers a story that moves between the living and the dead, the digital and the primal, the televised and the deeply personal. From Amabel Hadley's ghost drifting host-to-host, to her nine genetically linked children reconnecting over glitchy Zoom calls, to Carl Walchuk dissolving into the timeless present of the Amazon rainforest, the narrative pulses with eerie intimacy and emotional voltage. Wolos writes with a voice that is both feral and precise - a style that refuses to behave, refuses to flatten, refuses to let the reader look away. This is a novel about fame, trauma, inheritance, and the strange afterlives created by reality television. It is also a story about the children who were never meant to meet, the mother who watches them from beyond, and the father who vanished into a world without numbers, memory, or mirrors.
Amabel's Children is haunting, propulsive, and impossible to categorize - a literary thriller with a metaphysical heartbeat.
When celebrity actress Amabel Hadley dies of cancer, ten of her frozen, pre-fertilized embryos are implanted into ten carefully selected surrogate couples for a reality show called Amabel's Children. Raised apart, filmed constantly, and shaped by the expectations of millions, the children grow up as strangers connected only by genetics and spectacle.
Now, a decade after the show's cancellation, the siblings reconnect through a series of awkward, revealing Zoom calls. As they compare memories, identities, and the strange mythology built around their origins, they begin to question the narrative that shaped their lives.
Meanwhile, Amabel's ghost drifts from host to host, watching fragments of the show that exploited her death. And Carl Walchuk - Amabel's grieving husband - has fled to the Amazon rainforest, where time dissolves and memory becomes unreliable.
Told through shifting perspectives, Amabel's Children explores the consequences of manufactured identity, the ethics of entertainment, and the fragile boundaries between family, fame, and fate.
Wolos, Gregory: - Gregory Wolos is an award-winning American fiction writer whose work has appeared in dozens of respected literary journals and anthologies. Known for his psychologically rich storytelling and finely crafted prose, Wolos explores the tensions, mysteries, and emotional undercurrents that shape ordinary lives. His fiction often blends realism with subtle surreal or uncanny elements, creating narratives that linger long after the final page. A Pushcart Prize nominee many times over, Wolos has earned a reputation as a distinctive and compelling voice in contemporary literary fiction.
