Square Eyes

Anna Mill and Luke Jones created Square Eyes, published by Jonathan Cape in 2018. Fin has lost access to a powerful system she helped invent, just as people begin disappearing from the city's streets.

The mystery draws her through a future where digital overlays alter perception. To understand what happened, she must learn to see the city without the system that once made her influential.

The book makes augmented reality a problem of political control, not a decorative screen effect. If a network determines what people notice, it can shape who is ignored.

Its visual ambition is integral to that question. The reader experiences abundance and disorientation alongside Fin rather than receiving a simple explanation of the technology.

Digital layers blur memory, dream, and shared reality. Disconnection becomes both a loss of social power and an unexpected way to detect what the connected overlook.

The premise asks who owns a city when its visible surfaces can be edited. Disappearance is especially frightening in a world that can make absence appear normal.

Mill's detailed, shifting cityscapes make the digital environment feel simultaneously seductive and unstable. Dense color and architecture reward slow looking.

The pages let visual noise become evidence. The reader has to sort through competing signals much as Fin does.