Skip to product information
1 of 1

Yu & Me Books

Book Launch | Local Heavens by KM Fajardo

Book Launch | Local Heavens by KM Fajardo

Regular price $23.90 USD
Regular price Sale price $23.90 USD
Sale Sold out
Admission

Pre-purchase your copy of the featured title to guarantee your signed copy! This helps ensure that everyone who wants a book goes home with one, in case we sell out at the event. 

Can't make it to the event? Order your copy here instead. 

ABOUT THE BOOK

A corporate hacker. An elusive billionaire. A society trying to survive the American Nightmare. 

New York City, 2075. Filipino American Nick Carraway has just moved to the heart of the fractured New Americas, where he’s struck by the city’s contradictions—shining corporate towers casting bleak shadows over the slums of a crumbling middle class. 

When Nick meets alluring, new-money Jay Gatsby, he falls for Gatsby’s frank charm and confident aura. But in a city where the wealthy flaunt tech-enhanced bodies to cheat death, surfaces aren’t all they seem—and as a corporate-sanctioned cyberspace hacker, Nick knows that no secret can stay buried forever. He’s the reason they don’t. And his latest assignment? Investigate Gatsby himself. 

As Nick becomes entangled in the dark affairs of the elite—and the devastating fallout of their actions on the city’s most vulnerable—he must reckon with the limits of compassion and accountability across class and status. What takes precedence: Love or truth? Heart or soul? 

A brilliant reimagining of Fitzgerald’s classic tale of glamour, desire, and desperation, Local Heavens examines the guardrails of morality . . . and the price of desire. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

K.M. Fajardo is a second-generation Filipino Canadian writer born and raised in the Toronto suburbs. She graduated from the University of Waterloo with a degree in Global Business and Digital Arts before working in the tech industry. A speculative fiction writer, she enjoys stories that straddle genres and characters that find home in a strange world. After a childhood spent roaming bookstores, she now lives and writes in Toronto with her rescue cat, Clementine, and can occasionally be found haunting the nearest café. Local Heavens is her debut novel. Find her online at kmfajardo.com.

IN CONVERSATION WITH

Christina Li is the award-winning author of children’s books Clues to the Universe, which was a Washington Post summer book club pick, and Ruby Lost and Found, which was an NPR and New York Public Library Best Book of the Year and recognized for the Asian Pacific American Librarians’ Award for Best Children’s Literature. She is also the author of the YA title True Love and Other Impossible Odds, as well as a forthcoming fiction debut, The Manor of Dreams (Avid Reader Press), which has been listed as one of TIME Magazine’s most anticipated novels of 2025. She loves to daydream about characters and drink too much jasmine green tea. She grew up in the Midwest and California but now calls New York home.

-

Kathryn Budig is an internationally celebrated yoga teacher, author, and founder of the online communities Haus of Phoenix and the Inky Phoenix book club, with over 400,000 followers on Instagram and Facebook. She’s known for curating magical realism, historical fiction, and dark fantasy books with a focus on LGBTQ+ and BIPOC themes and authors. In 2023, she founded Inky Phoenix Press in partnership with Bindery Books, where she has a thriving membership community. Budig is the cohost of the Webby Award–nominated podcast Free Cookies, was the yoga editor at Women’s Health magazine for five years, and is the author of The Women’s Health Big Book of Yoga and the bestselling wellness guide Aim True. She lives in Charleston, South Carolina, with her wife, Kate Fagan, and their dog, Ragnar.

View full details