Name: KAL: The Witness
Author: Jay Moksha

01

A man nobody looks at, who sees everything.

Kal is an IT programmer in Melbourne, originally from India, in his late thirties. He has social anxiety, ADHD, and a quiet history of being bullied. He is the man on the tram you have never once noticed.

The novel follows a series of encounters in which his presence quietly shifts the people around him. He does not intend it. He does not explain it. It simply happens, and then he goes home to a life smaller and lonelier than anyone would guess.

Underneath it runs Hayley, a woman who begins to notice the pattern he leaves behind. She is the first person who ever has.

Something happened to Kal years ago that changed how he perceives people. He has never told anyone.

02

The opening

Kal had stopped trying to explain what he noticed about people. It only made them uncomfortable.

The tram was already three stops in when Kal found the seat he wanted, back row, left side, the one where the heating vent was broken and nobody stayed long. He sat down with his bag on his lap and his jacket still buttoned and looked out at Melbourne moving through a Tuesday in July.

Moving. Getting somewhere. Not looking up.

Outside, the city was the colour of a decision not yet made. Low sky, the grey of winter in the southern hemisphere that looked nothing like English grey or Indian grey: it was its own thing, this Melbourne grey, without drama in it. The plane trees along the boulevard were stripped back to their essential shapes. They looked more honest in winter. He appreciated that about them.

He liked this hour. Before the noise built. Before the day announced its requirements.

From the opening of KAL: The Witness

03

The Proudly ADHD Friendly seal. A two hemisphere line drawing of a brain on a lit core, ringed by the words Proudly ADHD Friendly and Every Mind Welcome.

Every mind welcome.

Every book we publish carries this seal. It is a promise about structure, not a warning about content.

Chapters are short and interlocking, and each one largely stands on its own, so putting the book down never means losing the thread. Scene breaks are frequent and clearly marked. Nothing is padded to reach a page count.

Books built this way are easier for everyone. For some of us they are the difference between finishing and not.

Full title: KAL: The Invisible Man Who Sees Everything
Form: Literary fiction. Book One of the Kal series.
Structure: Sixteen interlocking chapters. Around 41,500 words.
Editions: Paperback, ebook and audiobook
ISBN: 978-1-7647465-0-2
Ebook: ISBN 978-1-7647465-1-9. Price varies by store.
Publisher: Witness Press
Status: Ebook out now. Paperback 5 November.

04

Every book we publish is about paying attention.

The next one is written by people who are paying attention to us.

Non-fiction / Thirteen essays / In development

WitnessThe 2020s as Future Historians See It

In the year 2387, a historian walks a tour group through a preserved hospital. It was built in 2004 and decommissioned in 2289, and everything inside has been left exactly where it was found. It is not a museum of medicine. It is a museum of choice. He has given this tour one hundred and forty seven times.

He stops at a glass case holding one itemised bill. A construction worker named Thomas Chen, fifty one years old, who arrived at two in the morning with chest pain. The total comes to one hundred and twenty five thousand dollars. He died owing most of it. The remainder passed to his daughter.

There are twelve people on the tour. Some take photographs. Some cry. They are trying to understand how a civilisation with enough of everything decided that some people deserved treatment and others did not.

The person I want you to meet next is yourself.

Thirteen essays, each named for a term of the period. Six of them

The Creator Economy
Carbon Footprint
Location Sharing
Controlled Substance
Unlimited Paid Time Off
Hostile Architecture

The other seven are being written.

What unsettles is not the verdict. It is the absence of one. The historians do not call anyone cruel. They look at the people who sent the invoices, wrote the policies, signed the memos, and they conclude that those people were doing their jobs inside a framework that had already decided for them. They were, in the historian's words, ordinary.

We read about witch hunts and feel certain we would have known better. In 2387 they read about us, and they are not certain we knew better either.

Tell me when it is out

In development

Further books are in development across fiction and non-fiction. We will name them when they are closer.

05

Jay Moksha

Jay Moksha writes about the people other books walk past.

KAL: The Witness is the first novel, and the first book from Witness Press. The next is a book of essays written from the year 2387, looking back at this decade. Different in form, identical in preoccupation. Both are about attention. Who receives it, who never has, and what it costs to be the one paying it.

Every Witness Press book is built to be finished. Short chapters, clear breaks, nothing padded to reach a page count. That is a structural decision made for readers whose attention does not run in a straight line, and it shapes the work from the outline forward rather than arriving as an adjustment at proof stage.

06

Join the reader list

KAL is out now as an ebook. The paperback arrives on 5 November, and the reader list is how you hear the moment it does. After that, one email when each new book is ready. Never for any other reason. No newsletter, no forwarding, no selling your address on.

07

We are listening.

Questions about the book, rights and permissions, review copies, or anything else. Write below and it reaches us directly.

Or write to us directly at [email protected].

KalThe Witness