A novel
The Shared Pulse:
Love and Transformation in a City of Crossings
In a world where love has become an optimization problem, chaos is the only path to connection.
Your cracks are not flaws. They are openings.
The Shared Pulse is a contemporary novel set in Istanbul, between systems that promise certainty and relationships that resist being solved.
Alev lives by the algorithm of her AI life coach. Toprak manipulates his compatibility score on a dating app designed to predict desire.
As their lives intersect, the story asks what happens when intimacy is measured, tracked, and optimized—and what it costs to stay present inside that logic.
Can love survive when it is treated as an optimization problem?
This is a journey through the glitches of the heart—a reminder that love is not a noun, but a verb.
Echoes from the City of Crossings
“Maybe love isn’t a spark you chase or a pulse you share. Maybe it’s the decision to stay in the room—to keep showing up, even after the song ends.”
“We return to places not to find what we lost, but to recognize who we’ve become.”
“What if all their laughter was just another data point?”
“Gone is never gone. It only changes form—the warmth after flame, the tremor after wind, the silence is still humming in my ear.”
“A city of crossings, where continents leaned toward each other like old friends sharing secrets over tea, like old enemies allowing the currents to pass between them.
“The city remembers for us.”
This Book Explores
- The Digital Pursuit of Perfection—the tension between an impeccable surface and uncontrollable flow
- Love as a Verb—connection as practice, not outcome
- Elemental Transformation—Fire, Earth, Air, Water as stages of becoming
- The Wisdom of the Glitch—authenticity emerging when systems fail
Who This Book Is For
- The Digitally Optimized who feel measured to death
- Perfectionists in Recovery ready to let light enter their cracks
- Lovers of liminal cities and in-between states
- Modern seekers quietly rewritten by technology
Editorial Review
🏆 Must Read
“Philosophically observant and fascinating speculative romance that integrates technology and humanity into concepts of dating and love.”
What elevates all of this is the author’s language. The prose is sensory and alive, for example, “The night was already pressing the windows,” or “The city below stretched its limbs.” The author’s command of wordcraft feels effortless and immersive, making the emotional and philosophical questions feel real and alive rather than abstract. This is speculative fiction at its best: using near-future technology to interrogate identity, intimacy, and the radical idea that our cracks aren’t flaws at all: they’re openings.
— Rachel Barnard, Author and Editorial Reviewer