Art and science mix in this profound journey through grief, love, and human connection.

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When quantum physicist Noah is invited by an eccentric billionaire to join a secretive lab to research consciousness shifting and time travel, he jumps at the opportunity. He has good reason to engage in speculative science – if it works, he could see his daughter Serena again, who died before the age of four.

Noah’s artist wife Maya is looking for a new start, too. She’s feeling unsettled in her career, having set aside painting for a job in development at a gallery, but doesn’t know what she wants.

As Noah begins mining his precious memories and journeying into the past, the couple drifts, each seeking to go back to a version of their life that only existed before they met each other. Noah, for obvious reasons, longs for a time before his marriage to Maya when Serena was alive. Maya, fumbling for purpose, is drawn to an ex-boyfriend, tempted by a time when they were young and the future was a vast open space in front of them and they were confused about who they were, but creatively fueled by the unknown. 

Lightbreakers is a deeply human story about grief. Noah would give anything to rewrite history and keep Serena alive. Maya is trying to travel through his grief by his side, but she can never truly know that part of his heart. While he is looking backwards with longing, she is looking to the future, begging him to start a family with her. But the unchangeable past is “pushing like a spike into their present,” calling into question whether their marriage can survive.

Noah’s path is well developed and the ache of losing his child is heartbreaking to read. Maya’s motivations were a little less clear to me, and I spent a lot of time trying to understand the nature of the mental time travel (as with most things related to quantum physics, I eventually gave up). 

Ultimately, the science in Lightbreakers is less important than the exploration of why humans are compelled to revisit the past and how we can find peace in the present. As Noah tells his daughter, black holes trap light and break it – but on the other side of the darkness is a whole other world of light.