by Jo Walton
First published 2001
Patricia Cowan sits in 2015, an elderly woman whose mind holds impossible memories. She remembers marrying Mark in one life, Bee in another. Two complete existences unfold in her recollections, each containing different children, different choices, different disasters that shaped the world around her. The fragments don't align. In one reality, certain catastrophic events destroyed lives and nations. In the other, different tragedies unfolded. Patricia struggles to understand which memories belong to her true past as her aging mind makes the task more urgent. She must sort through decades of contradictory experiences, examining the love, loss, and consequences that defined both possible lives. The parallel worlds feel equally real, equally hers. Time grows short as Patricia works to untangle the threads of her existence and discover which version of her life actually happened, or whether both somehow did.
Genres: literary-fiction, contemporary, magical-realism, alternate-history
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Period: 2015
320 pages · Hardcover · Tor Books