About this ebook
Ten years can measure a reign, a ritual, or a ruin. Here, it maps a descent.
Jiang Qin is thirty-eight years old, exhausted, and broke. After a lifetime of grinding work—kidney damage, a herniated spine, and a failed engagement—a piece of falling construction steel ends it all. But instead of oblivion, he wakes up as his eighteen-year-old self, still a high school student, still carrying the memories of a life wasted.
His mission is clear: make money. Forget love. Forget the beautiful, cruel girl who strung him along for seven years. This time, he will not be a backup. This time, he will buy Bitcoin, invest in Moutai stock, and secure the fortune that slipped through his fingers before.
But the past is not so easily abandoned. The girl is still there. The old neighborhood—soon to be demolished for compensation—still stands. And when he stumbles into a library and meets the cold, mysterious Ruo Nam—the untouchable rich girl no one dares approach—he discovers that the fastest path to capital might be the last thing he expected.
About the author
ROBERT SMITH is a writer exploring the fault lines between language, power, and the quiet desperation of ordinary life. His work lives in the gap between the word and its echo—the rule and its grotesque enforcement—drawing on the stark traditions of folktale, gothic bureaucracy, and the horror of watching yourself make the same mistakes twice.
Born with a restless ear for the rhythms of English and a deep fascination with how second tongues shape second selves, Smith crafts narratives that are meant to be felt as much as read. He is particularly interested in the concept of "selection" in all its cold, myriad forms—from factory assignments to family favoritism, from love to financial ruin—and how ordinary people learn to perform, forget, and endure.
Who Can Love After Being Reborn is Smith's first dual-language novel, born from years of observing how people chase money to fill the voids that love left behind. The novel's fractured structure—moving between English, German, and Ukrainian—reflects the author's belief that the most profound truths often live in the untranslatable spaces between words.
When not writing, Smith can be found chasing the ghost of a half-remembered story or staring out a window, mentally worlds away. He currently lives nowhere in particular, but his heart resides in the locked room between who you are and who you must become to survive.
