The Girl in Room 14B

Cleo has been at Arden House for ninety-three days. She is, by any measure, doing well. She has been keeping a list of things about herself she does not yet know how to read.

The Girl in Room 14B is a quiet, observational novella set in a near-future care facility. Cleo is seventeen, a careful noticer, doing well in the conventional senses of well. She has rules for the room. She keeps a journal. She has been at Arden House for ninety-three days and she has been writing things down, accumulating something, without yet deciding what she is building a case for.

The book belongs to her point of view entirely. The pace is slow because Cleo’s attention is slow: she watches her own habits accrue, weighs the shape of her thinking, registers the precision with which she remembers her three months of days. None of it is conclusive. All of it means something to her, and she lets it.

A second character arrives in the form of regular Tuesday visits, and what emerges between them, gradually, is the recognition that the question Cleo carries about herself may be a question shareable with someone who has independently arrived at the same place.

This is the first book in the Am I AI? series and the most common entry point. Readers who prefer Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun or Never Let Me Go to a thriller will find familiar ground.