The Child of None is the first book of a trilogy; which is a near-future novel that asks some of the newest questions we have learned how to pose, alongside some of the oldest we have never resolved.
At its core is motherhood—not as metaphor or ideal, but as a physical, ethical, and political reality. The novel examines what it means to carry a child in a world where technology advances faster than language, and where systems are increasingly invested in classification, ownership, and explanation. When something new enters the world without precedent, who has the authority to define it?
Set in a near-future London, the story unfolds quietly, through lived experience rather than spectacle. The future it imagines is not distant or fantastical; it is procedural, administrative, and unsettling precisely because it feels familiar. Power appears not through villains, but through institutions, protocols, and well-meaning mechanisms that insist on clarity at any cost.
The novel explores partnership and parenthood as sites of pressure rather than comfort. Intimacy is shaped by surveillance, care is entangled with control, and protection becomes an act that must be constantly negotiated. What begins as a private condition gradually attracts public interest, raising questions about autonomy, consent, inheritance, and the limits of authority over the body.
The Child of None places ancient human fears—loss, lineage, responsibility—inside modern structures built to manage risk and uncertainty. It asks what survives when life is observed, measured, and regulated, and what must be refused in order to protect what cannot yet speak for itself.
This is not a novel about resolution. It is a novel about boundaries. About choosing custody over permission, responsibility over compliance, and care over explanation.
It is a story about what we protect-and what we are willing to stand against in order to do so.
Işıl Tezol 