01
Friendship & First Love
The slow architecture of devotion built between two girls who have always orbited one another.
A Debut Novel
The Zen
Chickens
A Novel by Niles Burton
A lyrical story of friendship, awakening, desire, and the haunting force of love.
First Edition · Coming Soon
About the Novel
A story told in long, quiet breaths.
Set against the soft greens of summer fields and the bright pulse of a track at dawn, The Zen Chickens follows two girls whose lives have grown into one another since childhood — a friendship so close it begins to ache, a closeness so familiar it begins to burn.
What begins as devotion turns into rivalry, and rivalry into something quieter and far more unbearable: the slow recognition of love. As races are won and losses settled, a stranger tide moves underneath — visions that arrive without warning, hinting that what these two share has been waiting much longer than either of them has been alive.
A novel about the courage of becoming, and the terrifying mercy of being known.
Inside the World
The thematic landscape
Six emotional currents that move beneath the surface of the novel.
02
Longing & Rupture
The space between two people, measured in unspoken words and the distances we keep on purpose.
03
Devotion & Rivalry
Lanes side by side, footfalls in rhythm, the quiet violence of wanting to be the one in front.
04
Becoming Yourself
The unhurried, painful work of arriving at a self the world has not yet given a name.
05
Memory Across Time
A current of visions, recognitions, and echoes — the suggestion that some loves outlast their lives.
06
The Body as Witness
Lungs, pulse, sweat, breath — the way the body remembers what the heart cannot yet say.
Meet the Characters
Two girls. One unbearable gravity.
Character
Dakota
The runner who never breaks stride
Sharp, watchful, quietly relentless. Dakota measures the world in footfalls and finish lines, a girl who has learned that wanting too much can be a kind of weakness — and that some hungers refuse to be outrun.
Character
Marnie
The light Dakota cannot stop turning toward
Tender, mercurial, brave in a way she does not yet recognize. Marnie carries her own gravity, drawing Dakota back across years and miles toward a question neither of them has the courage to ask aloud.
From the Pages
Three glimpses, lightly held.
She crossed the line still moving, lungs rinsed clean, the world reduced to a single bright noise. For one suspended second she was nothing but breath — and beneath the breath, the certainty that she had been running toward someone all along.
It arrived without ceremony, the way weather does. One moment she was laughing; the next she could not look at Marnie without understanding everything, and what she understood was so simple, and so terrible, that she had to set down her cup so her hands would not give her away.
The room thinned. She saw a porch she had never stood on, a hand she had never held, a name she had never spoken — and Marnie inside all of it, turning, always turning, as if she had been waiting on the other side of a door for longer than either of them had been alive.
Book Details
For the record.
A few quiet facts about the book — release information will be updated as it becomes available.
- Title
- The Zen Chickens
- Author
- Niles Burton
- Genre
- Literary Fiction · Coming-of-Age
- Format
- Hardcover · Paperback · eBook
- Release Date
- TBA
- ISBN
- TBA
- Publisher
- Independent
- Availability
- Pre-order soon
Where to Buy
Retail links will be added as they become live.
About the Author
Niles Burton
Niles Burton writes at the seam where the ordinary turns luminous — small towns, long summers, the inner weather of girls and women learning what to do with the feelings they were not given language for.
The Zen Chickens is his debut novel. He lives quietly, runs occasionally, and keeps a notebook for things he overhears.
Praise
Early whispers
Placeholder advance praise
“A novel that holds its breath alongside you, and then, very gently, lets it go.”
“Burton writes the small interiors of girlhood as if they were rooms with weather.”
“Tender, strange, and finally devastating.”
Stay Close
Discover the story.
Read it when it arrives.
Follow the journey to publication, or buy The Zen Chickens the moment it lands.