Verging between an emerging and established literary talent, Jordan Tannahill adds to his growing list of work with the newly released Liminal. A nearly 300-page consideration of what it means to be alive, from historical and technological perspectives, right down to the personal and molecular level, this novel is evidence that existential dread does not simply disappear after one’s teenage years.

While the scope of the topic is large, the time frame is not; the entire semi-autobiographical work takes place in a single moment. The narrator (who bears the author’s name) walks into his mother’s bedroom one morning and is confronted with her unmoving body. A stereotypical millennial, Jordan is consumed by defining the self, which, for him, carries the labels of queer, liberal, atheist, world-traveler, and self-taught pseudo-intellectual. The novel becomes an adolescent odyssey through his thoughts and memories, from the mountains of Bulgaria, to an operating table in Mexico, to DIY porn film sets in highway motels, merging life and art at Kensington market, programming robots in London, temples, tombs, and the womb of his mother. All of this to try and make sense of the division of mind/body, life/death, and the in-between, personified by his mother’s body, existing in a singularity, stagnant and suspended in Schrodinger’s superposition.

Like many modern novels, Liminal does not unfold along a linear plot, but is a collection of personal essay-like meditations that provide various perspectives on the central question of what it means to be alive, specifically in the modern world. Drawing on ancient philosophical history as well as future technological advancements, Tannahill explores various ideas of consciousness throughout human history, punctuated by present day anti-Trump political movements, the Syrian Refugee crisis in the EU, 9/11, and the lasting effects of the AIDS epidemic.

Throughout the novel, the central theme of the dichotomy of human experience is emphasized by the style of Tanahill’s prose, a back and forth between bouts of intellectual interjections – explanations of complex scientific theories and half-digested philosophy – and anecdotes from the narrator’s own life, in the form of visceral descriptions involving feces, pre-pubescent pubic hair, cockroaches, sweat, and sex. The inclusion of academic discussion gives the reader insight into how Jordan interprets his world. Tannahill illustrates the implications of a mind/body split in yet another way: eliciting discomfort by jolting the reader from abstract philosophies to bodily faculties and functions, he makes the reader ever aware that corporeality is synonymous with mortality.

Liminal reads like a confession. Filled with over-exposure and vulnerability, it creates an honest, raw portrayal of growing up and figuring it out. Occasionally cliché and dramatized, Tannahill never shies away from ascribing meaning to every individual experience, creating connections between unrelated phenomena, and politicizing the personal to make a point. The importance Jordan imbues on everything culminates in the final chapter, wherein the previously cyclically structured analysis of a single subject dissolves into stream of consciousness, overwhelming the reader’s senses. Clearly, the narrator’s need for meaning and connection is an attempt to make sense of his mother’s condition (everyone’s inevitable condition), which requires all of the significance of his life to interpret, understand, and accept.

Overall, the use of language and form in the novel effectively negotiates the relationships situated in the in-between spaces of your twenties: border crossings, gender transition, performance art, and corpse and consciousness. Part philosophical contemplation, part ode to a mother, somewhat self-indulgent, and sentimental, Liminal explores the ancient and futuristic, the scientific and spiritual, and the familiar and foreign, in a well-balanced work that appreciates the complexity of the topics it tackles, exploring them without attempting to overcome them.