Part of Impossible Times
First published 2019
Nick Hayes is nineteen years old, studying at Cambridge in the summer of 1986, and trying very hard to be ordinary. He is a cancer survivor, a boy genius, and a person who has already meddled with time travel once. Ordinary is not going well. When a strange girl crosses his path, one who feels familiar in a way he cannot explain, Nick realizes something has gone wrong with time itself. The fabric has folded. Creases have appeared, and he is sitting at the center of them. Working alongside Professor Halligan, a mathematician of serious reputation, Nick starts to understand the shape of the problem. A split in the timeline is spreading, and if it goes unchecked, the damage will reach far beyond him. His ex-girlfriend Mia is caught up in it. So is his fellow student Helen. Nick has to make a single choice that will determine which version of events survives. He cannot have both. The stakes are not abstract. They are personal, immediate, and ticking down. This is the second book in the Impossible Times trilogy.
Genres: science-fiction, contemporary, thriller, young-adult
Vibes: high-stakes, introspective, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, impossible-choice, personal-stakes, timeline-paradox
Setting: Cambridge
Period: 1986
222 pages · Kindle Edition · 47North
Content warnings: death