Dan Pieper – illustratör

Warden of Silence (The Watchers of Silence Series, Book 1) In the frozen, isolated forests of Jämtland, Sweden, a solitary engineer named Henrik Ekström is hiding a world-shattering secret beneath his barn. Without government funding, corporate backing, or anyone’s knowledge, Henrik has spent fifteen years building the impossible: a fully functional, faster-than-light spacecraft. Guided by Elin, a brilliantly sarcastic artificial intelligence, and fuelled by complex equations that came to him in his dreams, Henrik successfully travels to Proxima Centauri and back. But when he decides it’s time to break his silence and sends a letter proving his discovery to the Swedish government, he ignites a global geopolitical earthquake. Sweden’s steely Prime Minister, Natalia Andersson, quickly realises her nation is now the sole custodian of the most transformative technology in human history. As Sweden attempts to forge a secretive new alliance with Europe and Australia to protect the discovery, the old world order refuses to go quietly. The United States and other global superpowers will stop at nothing to seize control of the ship, pushing Earth to the brink of war. Yet, the greatest threat lies far beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Henrik’s ship wasn’t just an invention; it was an answer to a recursive mathematical signal buried deep within the cosmic microwave background radiation. The universe has left a map, but as Henrik and a hand-picked team prepare to step into the dark, they’re forced to ask a terrifying question: if humanity answers the call, what else might be listening? Warden of Silence is a gripping, hard science fiction and geopolitical thriller about the burden of being first, the tension between secrecy and truth, and what happens when a single, stubborn mind changes the course of human history.