Where the Axe Is Buried A Novel

By: Ray Nayler

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025-04

All systems fail. All societies crumble. All worlds end.

In the authoritarian Federation, there is a plot to assassinate and replace the President, a man who has downloaded his mind to a succession of new bodies to maintain his grip on power. Meanwhile, on the fringes of a Western Europe that has renounced human governance in favor of ostensibly more efficient, objective, and peaceful AI Prime Ministers, an experimental artificial mind is malfunctioning, threatening to set off a chain of events that may spell the end of the Western world.

As the Federation and the West both start to crumble, Lilia, the brilliant scientist whose invention may be central to bringing down the seemingly immortal President, goes on the run, trying to break out from a near-impenetrable web of Federation surveillance. Her fate is bound up with a worldwide group of others fighting against the global status quo: Palmer, the man Lilia left behind in London, desperate to solve the mystery of her disappearance; Zoya, a veteran activist imprisoned in the taiga, whose book has inspired a revolutionary movement; Nikolai, the President’s personal physician, who has been forced into more and more harrowing decisions as he navigates the Federation’s palace politics; and Nurlan, the hapless parliamentary staffer whose attempt to save his Republic goes terribly awry. And then there is Krotov, head of the Federation’s security services, whose plots, agents, and assassins are everywhere.

Following the success of his debut novel, The Mountain in the Sea, Ray Nayler launches readers into a thrilling near-future world of geopolitical espionage. A cybernetic novel of political intrigue, Where the Axe is Buried combines the story of a near-impossible revolutionary operation with a blistering indictment of the many forms of authoritarianism that suffocate human freedom.