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
The book begins with an incident that would make headlines if it ever came out — a dark and taboo boundary crossed that entangles two girls and a middle‑aged man in ways none of them expect. But what follows is far deeper: the story of Dakota and Marnie, whose bond and break form the heart of a rare and powerful love story. Alongside them runs the man’s own reckoning as he finally wakes up to the damage he’s done and begins the long work of changing himself. At its core, this is a story about love, growth, and redemption in all their complicated forms.
First Edition · Coming Soon
About the Novel
A story told in long, quiet breaths.
Set in Eugene, Oregon — Tracktown USA — The Zen Chickens follows three lives braided together by a single afternoon and unwound across the next eight years. Told in alternating first-person chapters, the novel moves between two sixteen-year-old girls and a forty-something man whose paths cross once, and never quite uncross.
What follows is not a story about what happened that day. It is a story about what people do with what happened — the slow, unglamorous work of carrying it, naming it, and finally laying it down. A novel about friendship that becomes love, addiction that becomes reckoning, and the strange recognitions that arrive when a life has been quiet long enough to hear them.
The Setting
Eugene, Oregon — Tracktown USA.
Rain-soft, tree-lined, quietly athletic — a college town that has produced more milers than most countries. The novel begins on a Eugene training trail and ends on a farm north of the city.
- Population
- ≈ 180,000
- Anchor
- University of Oregon
- Span
- Eight years
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
Three voices. Eight years. One long arc toward grace.
Each character narrates their own chapters in the first person. The novel belongs to all three equally.
Sixteen
Marnie
The watcher who learns to look inward
Sixteen, five-foot-three, dark hair to the neckline, an exotic complexion she has never quite explained to anyone. Direct, intense, quick with a swear word. She runs track in her sophomore year mostly to stay close to her best friend, and dreams in the margins of her notebooks — she wants to be a graphic artist. It is Marnie who first begins to see, in waves, the lovers who came before them.
Sixteen
Dakota
The distance runner with a hidden weather
Sixteen, five-foot-nine, blond hair worn in long waves. Perky and easy on the surface; underneath, a country of feelings and small traumas she has learned to keep quiet. She intends to be a world-champion distance runner, and she means it. Her appetite for life — for risk, for closeness, for being seen — is the engine and the wound of everything that follows.
Forty-something
Malcolm
The man who has to meet himself, finally
Forty-something, lean, brown hair around the chin. A chef at a local natural-foods store, a road cyclist of decades, an occasional triathlete. He also carries a secret life — one he has not yet admitted is a life. After a single reckless afternoon, Malcolm begins the long, faltering walk toward twelve-step rooms, relapse, and rupture. Eventually, he becomes the best version of himself.
The Arc
An eight-year story, told gently.
The Zen Chickens is not a book about a single afternoon. It is a book about three people who grow through it, around it, and finally past it.
A meeting that should not have happened
Marnie and Dakota come back from a run and share a few quiet tokes. Malcolm, returning from a long ride, sits down with them. What is offered, what is accepted, and what is witnessed will follow each of them for the next eight years. During it, Marnie has her first vision — lovers, glimpsed across centuries.
Prompted by his friend Leroy, Malcolm begins attending twelve-step meetings. He relapses. He drifts. He blows up his first serious relationship. Eventually he learns how to begin again and live a life he can be proud of.
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.
Sport, psychology, meditation, sexuality, reincarnation — the book moves through all of them with the patience of a long run.
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
Eugene, Oregon
I’m a man in my early seventies, old enough to have lived several different lives and still curious enough to keep learning from them. I’ve moved through trauma, love, danger, endurance athletics, black‑market shadows, and the relentless heat of high‑intensity kitchens. I’ve traveled widely, read obsessively since I was four, and spent decades studying psychology, sociology, and political history — not from a classroom, but from the vantage point of someone trying to understand how people become who they are.
I’ve lived long enough to know that people don’t change because they want to. They change because something forces them to — something painful, undeniable, and impossible to ignore. This book is my attempt to capture that moment, and the long, messy, beautiful work that follows.
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.