Barry Somes spends his days narrating two-hour trolley tours through the streets of Portland, Maine, pointing out the city’s history to tourists who have no idea their guide has quietly built a career as a novelist with 15 published books to his name. His sixteenth, Echoes of an Awakening, the first installment in a planned series, may be the one that changes that.
The idea for the book began, oddly enough, on vacation. While visiting Ottawa, Canada’s capital, Somes came across a folder left behind in a coffee shop across the street from Parliament. Inside were notes belonging to a Canadian mining company asking where it could apply for a permit to mine the moon. Canada had no authority to issue one, which left Somes wondering exactly who would. That question, and the element the company was after, stuck with him.
The book introduces Margo, a college student who stumbles across a misfiled, classified government document while researching a term paper on meteors. What she finds draws the attention of the CIA and eventually leads her into a French laboratory she was never trained to break into.
“I had in the back of my mind that I wanted to write a James Bond-style book, but about a female James Bond, sort of a role model for teenage girls,” Barry Somes said. “A Jane Bond, not a James Bond.”
The Ottawa Folder mentioned an element called Helium-3, and that idea sat waiting for a story to attach itself to. Helium-3 has two protons and one neutron, fuels the sun, and is scattered across the moon’s surface by solar flares. A single cubic yard, properly harnessed in a fusion reactor, could reportedly power New York City for a year, with no radioactive waste and no carbon footprint. It rarely survives its trip through Earth’s atmosphere, so it is nearly nonexistent here. The Apollo mission to the moon back in the ’60s brought back a sample of “lunar material” which contained a heavy concentration of Helium-3 which, Somes points out, simply vanished from the record.
“It’s the ultimate fuel,” he said. “But the government says it takes 30 years to develop a fusion reactor. I’m thinking they’re just saying, nothing to see here, because this would put the fossil fuel companies right out of business, and they have too much political pull to let that happen.”
Combining that premise with his long-held ambition for a female spy protagonist, Somes built the world of Echoes of an Awakening, in which Margo, later going by the name Anne, becomes the target of a shadowy group called the Jefferson Commission, a secret society dating to Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson that has spent two centuries protecting the wealthiest Americans’ fortunes. Margo’s pursuers are not limited to the Commission’s reach inside the United States. The CIA faction hunting her is headed by the Vice President of the United States, and even the KGB has a stake in tracking her down, leaving her caught between intelligence services on both sides of the Cold War divide. When a research doctor steals Helium-3 from a government lab and disappears into France, Margo is sent, with only days of training, to spy on him.
“When they chose her to go to France and try to spy on this doctor, to see what he was doing and who he was working with, I think that’s the biggest challenge she had,” Somes said. “Completely going into the unknown with just a few days of training and trying to break into a lab at nighttime and find out what was going on. I think that was the most dangerous thing she encountered.”
Somes describes Margo as tough, athletic, and allergic to losing, a scientist and martial artist who never backs down from a challenge and who consistently exceeds what is expected of her, despite having no real CIA experience or ambition to become a spy. It is precisely that reluctant heroism, he said, that he hopes will resonate with young readers.
Beneath the espionage, Somes wants readers left with bigger questions: who controls information that could upend the global economy, how the wealthiest protect and expand their wealth generation after generation, and whether a story built around a real, documented element could be closer to fact than fiction.
“Could this be possible? And is it possible? Is it a reality right now?” Somes said. “I think I left enough doubt there, so people might think, you know, this could be really happening.”
The novel closes with a direct address to readers, inviting them to visit real locations referenced in the book, from a cafe in Strasbourg to the Ross Memorial Library in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, and to ask themselves whether the woman behind the counter might, just might, be Anne.
Somes came to fiction almost by accident. A career in the travel industry ended abruptly when the pandemic hit, but a high school elective in fiction writing, and an early introduction to Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, had already planted the seed. Years of unsuccessful essay contests followed, then a cold email to a New York Times bestselling author he saw on television, who agreed to coach him through an outline, a first chapter, and finally a finished manuscript. A publisher warned him bluntly that literary prizes were not in his future, and told him to lean into what he did best: telling stories people want to read. That advice led to The Mannequin Murderer, about a serial killer who hates killing people but loves posing their bodies for the public to find, his bestselling title to date.
With Echoes of an Awakening, Somes hopes he has found something even bigger: a character built to carry an entire series and a question he is content to leave unanswered.
Echoes of an Awakening by Barry Somes is available now in paperback, hardcover, and Kindle editions.
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Amazon: https://a.co/d/0ft4koDZ
