A lyric memoir for readers of Ocean Vuong, Karl Ove Knausgård, and Khalil Gibran. Four generations. One question beneath all of it: what passes between people without anyone deciding to pass it on?

There are debut books, and then there are debuts that arrive fully formed. Niki Kai: Another Ordinary Guy is the second kind.

Written in short, breath-length chapters that read more like lyric poetry than conventional prose, it strips the distance between page and reader down to nothing. The sentences don't explain. They land.

A great-grandmother who gave warmth she'd never received. A grandfather who signed away his inheritance without drama. A man in his thirties running ultras at four in the morning, telling himself it isn't escape.

No country is named. No era is dated. A story designed to belong nowhere in particular — and therefore everywhere.

He is you. You are him.