Clandestine Games: Junior Recruit by Jonathan Berent
“Some games, once started, never end.”
Synopsis
Cassidy Hutchins can reach past conscious thought and pull answers straight from her subconscious — on demand. When an anonymous invitation draws her into “the Game,” an underground Stanford puzzle hunt, she joins three other gifted students: a biohacker who engineers his own lucid dreams, a hacker who can breach anything, and a refugee whose faith hides a wound she can’t remember. But the Game’s puzzles are bleeding into the real world — a serial predator is stalking campus — and the Game was never just a game. It is an audition, and the intelligence agencies watching recruit winners. From Stanford’s dorms to the poker tables of Las Vegas, Junior Recruit is a techno-thriller built on real science: lucid dreaming, polyphasic sleep, and nootropics.
Quick facts
- Title: Clandestine Games: Junior Recruit
- Series: Clandestine Games, Book 1 (Book 2, Clandestine Games: White Terror, in progress)
- Author: Jonathan Berent
- Genre: Techno-thriller / espionage / psychological thriller
- Publication date: July 2026 (Amazon KDP)
- Formats: Kindle (ASIN B0H8FSPCBR) · Paperback, 6×9, 313 pages (ASIN B0H8FL7VVW) · free serialized audiobook at clandestinegames.com/listen (Audible edition in progress)
- Award: Finalist, 2019 William Faulkner–William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition
- Buy: amazon.com/dp/B0H8FL7VVW · Goodreads
- Sample chapters: clandestinegames.com/sample-chapters
About the author
Jonathan Berent is the founder and CEO of NextSense, a Silicon Valley neurotechnology company that senses the brain from inside the ear. Before NextSense he was a director of stealth projects at X, Google’s moonshot factory. A Stanford graduate, he guest-lectures on lucid dreaming and sleep hacking in Stanford’s legendary Sleep and Dreams course. Clandestine Games: Junior Recruit, his debut, was a finalist in the 2019 William Faulkner–William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition; he drafted it in three months in 2016 on a polyphasic sleep schedule after a lucid dream told him to write a novel. He is the son of novelists Mark and Polly Berent and lives in Mountain View, California.
The real science & the real Game
The Game is a real Stanford and Bay Area tradition (Joe Belfiore’s Bay Area Race Fantastique and the Game, late 1980s–2000s). Lucid dreaming, polyphasic sleep, and nootropics in the novel are drawn from the author’s own experience as a neurotech founder and sleep researcher. Only the recruiting is fiction. Probably.
Press contact
Interviews, review copies, and podcast bookings: jb@nextsense.io
Links: Buy on Amazon (Kindle & paperback) · Goodreads · Free serialized audiobook · Sample chapters · NextSense · Press kit
This is a work of fiction. Stanford University’s name and campus appear solely as a fictional setting; this book is an independent work and is not affiliated with, sponsored, endorsed, or approved by Stanford University.