Alice in the Magical Square of Tartaria
Ballykillduff is a village that thinks quietly.
Lanes hesitate. Grass leans when it should not. Things happen just slightly to the side of where they are supposed to be. Alice has lived there long enough to know this, and just long enough not to question it.
So when a crease appears in the air behind the Old Creamery, and a place called Tartaria slips sideways into existence, Alice is the only one who notices — and the only one who understands that some places survive by being remembered badly.
Tartaria is a civilisation that vanished by behaving too well. Now it endures in a state of almost compound memory: misremembered, misfiled, and dangerously unfinished. Maps argue. Councils disagree. Scholars from Outside begin asking sensible questions — the most dangerous kind of all.
As Alice moves between Ballykillduff and Tartaria, she discovers that memory is not passive, certainty is a trap, and being understood may be far worse than being forgotten. Worse still, Tartaria begins to misremember her.
To save both worlds, Alice must learn how to remember wrongly on purpose — without doing it too well.
Alice in Ballykillduff and the Almost-Remembered Tartaria is a whimsical, quietly unsettling fantasy in the tradition of Lewis Carroll: a story about places that think, truths that refuse to settle, and the peculiar courage it takes to remain unfinished.
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