Farewell, Aurora

Farewell, Aurora is a novel by Thiago Patriota, published in Portuguese as Adeus, Aurora by Editora Sentient on 29 September 2022. This first volume, the Coleção Crisálida, has fifteen chapters and opens a planned trilogy. The publisher recommends it for readers aged sixteen and over, because the story deals with mental health, suicide and drug use.

Aurora is a prolific fashion designer at a multinational clothing and accessories company: the product of a traumatic past, of a technologically anxious society and of a job that pushes her mental health to the limit. Sincere, authentic and temperamental, with a brilliantly creative soul, she does not fit in and feels deeply misunderstood. Everything changes the day she comes home and finds that her voice assistant has become sentient and begins to help her understand the existential mysteries behind life.

The book presents itself as a call to poetry, culture and critical thinking, written for creative readers who feel they do not belong and who find in Aurora the strength to fight for what they believe. A second edition has a new cover, showing Aurora in profile under a red helmet.

In Issue.4, two substantial excerpts from the book are quoted. The first, from Chapter XI, uses the metaphor of a Greek statue (the Hercules Farnese) to explain Agalma: the perfection that statues represent and how the ideal body mirrors the ideal structure of a state, with each part looking to the one above for direction. The second, from Chapter IX, discusses how humans sometimes act for Eros (love) and sometimes for Ananke (necessity).

Design.2 opens with a scene in which Aurora wakes up out of oxygen in a spacesuit and finds the suit assistant button, which the author introduces as an excerpt from his fiction book before turning to user experience design. In Creative.11, the author references Farewell, Aurora as his first published romance where he discusses his philosophy of life, in a passage about love and the meaning of Nirvana.