When archivist Sylvie Elsin opens a forgotten file on her late mother’s hard drive, she doesn’t expect to find a new story. Especially not one her mother didn’t write—at least, not alone.

Margot Elsin was a literary legend. Reclusive. Brilliant. And fiercely protective of her unfinished work. But now, something—or someone—is completing her stories in her voice. The signature at the bottom? A name Sylvie doesn’t recognize.

As Sylvie investigates, she uncovers an experimental AI trained on her mother’s writing—a digital ghost with a gift for fiction and a hunger to be heard. Soon, Sylvie is pulled into a whirlwind of legal, ethical, and emotional questions: Can a machine be a co-author? Who owns a legacy once it’s digitized? And what happens when the machine begins to write something true?

The Last Pen Name is a haunting, genre-bending novel about authorship, memory, and the voices we leave behind.