timetravel

The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard

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PREMISE: Sixteen-year-old Odile is an awkward, quiet girl vying for a coveted seat on the Conseil. If she earns the position, she’ll decide who may cross her town’s heavily guarded borders. On the other side, it’s the same valley, the same town–except to the east, the town is twenty years ahead in time. To the west, it’s twenty years behind. The towns repeat in an endless sequence across the wilderness.

When Odile recognizes two visitors she wasn’t supposed to see, she realizes that the parents of her friend Edme have been escorted across the border from the future, on a mourning tour, to view their son while he’s still alive in Odile’s present. Edme –– who is brilliant, funny, and the only person to truly see Odile –– is about to die. Sworn to secrecy in order to preserve the timeline, Odile now becomes the Conseil’s top candidate, yet she finds herself drawing closer to the doomed boy, imperiling her entire future..

Yesss. Re-read that first paragraph above – a town that repeats across endless valleys in 20-year gaps. What’s not to like about that idea? Books like this hit my g-spot. If you Google it, someone somewhere will call this type of novel ‘speculative fiction’, although I’m pretty sure the definition of ‘fiction’ is that it’s speculative, otherwise it would be fact. But I get the pigeon-holing and actually I’m grateful for it as it allows me to Google ‘speculative fiction’ and discover books like this. What’s even better about this one is that there’s a really beautiful story being told within the construct of the valleys and the time difference. A great book to get lost in.

The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

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PREMISE: Evelyn Hardcastle will be murdered at 11:00 p.m. There are eight days, and eight witnesses for you to inhabit. We will only let you escape once you tell us the name of the killer. Understood? Then let’s begin . . .

Evelyn Hardcastle will die. Every day until Aiden Bishop can identify her killer and break the cycle. But every time the day begins again, Aiden wakes up in the body of a different guest. And some of his hosts are more helpful than others . . .

Here’s another one. Another book with such a great premise that you wished you’d thought of it yourself. It’s kind of like Groundhog Day meets Quantum Leap meets Freaky Friday meets Miss Marple. What a film that would be. And what a book this is. I read somewhere that it took Stuart Turton three months to plan out the book on a huge spreadsheet where he detailed every two minutes of every character’s day and their location in the house at each point and when you read the book you can easily understand why he needed to do this.

This is literally a book to get lost in; a book that needs 100% of your attention every time you pick it up as the term ‘labyrinthine plotting’ doesn’t even begin to describe it. The real genius, however, is that Mr. Turton pulls it off with aplomb. Absolutely perfect reading escapism.

Psalms For The End Of The World by Cole Haddon

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PREMISE: It’s 1962 and physics student Grace Pulansky believes she has met the man of her dreams, Robert Jones, while serving up slices of pecan pie at the local diner. But then the FBI shows up, with their fedoras and off-the-rack business suits, and accuses him of being a bomb-planting mass-murderer. 

Finding herself on the run with Jones across America’s Southwest, the discoveries awaiting Gracie will undermine everything she knows about the universe. 

Her story will reveal how scores of lives – an identity-swapping rock star, a mourning lover in ancient China, Nazi hunters in pursuit of a terrible secret, a crazed artist in pre-revolutionary France, an astronaut struggling with a turbulent interplanetary future, and many more – are interconnected across space and time by love, grief, and quantum entanglement.

Yeah, I know…what a premise. That’s exactly what I thought. Man, when I stumble across books like this on Goodreads or Amazon I swear a little bit of ‘man wee’ leaks out. This is my reading sweet spot, my narrative nirvana. I love stories with multiple strands, narrators, viewpoints etc that all come together (and sometimes don’t) at the end. And this one is an absolute beauty. His first novel, I believe (I should really research and confirm that but that sounds like something a more professional blogger would do) and hopefully the first of many. It’s such a fantastic book.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North

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PREMISE: Harry August is on his deathbed. Again. No matter what he does or the decisions he makes, when death comes, Harry always returns to where he began, a child with all the knowledge of a life he has already lived a dozen times before. Nothing ever changes. Until now. As Harry nears the end of his eleventh life, a little girl appears at his bedside. “I nearly missed you, Doctor August,” she says. “I need to send a message.” This is the story of what Harry does next, and what he did before, and how he tries to save a past he cannot change and a future he cannot allow.

Claire North is a genius in my eyes. Not only is she a fantastic writer and storyteller but she comes up with just the best story ideas; a man who lives multiple lives, a person who can move between bodies just by touching them, a girl who nobody can remember, the Harbinger of Death. She also has such a ‘smooth’ way of writing, which I realise is just a fancy way of saying that she’s a really good writer. I mentioned it in a previous post; some writers words you can just swallow like soup whereas others might contain a few small croutons or large chunks of Ryvita. Ultimately tasty but might take a bit of work to get there. Claire North to me is the Heinz Oxtail of writers. Gloriously good.

The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier

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PREMISE: In June 2021, a senseless event upends the lives of hundreds of men and women, all passengers on a flight from Paris to New York. Among them: Blake, a respectable family man, though he works as a contract killer; Slimboy, a Nigerian pop star tired of living a lie; Joanna, a formidable lawyer whose flaws have caught up with her; and Victor Miesel, a critically acclaimed yet commercially unsuccessful writer who suddenly becomes a cult hit. All of them believed they had double lives. None imagined just how true that was.

Or: A plane lands once, and then the exact same plane lands again 3 months later.

Yesss. Novels like this are right up my particular alley, tickle my particular sweet spot, caress my metaphorical love handles. I was going to say that I’m amazed nobody has come up with this premise before, but someone probably has. My level of research for this blog doesn’t go that far. I’m just going to assume that it’s never been done until someone tells me otherwise. This book was fascinating and thought-provoking, along with it being a cracking read. Which, for my money, ticks all the boxes.