First published 2022
Joe Tournier is a British slave in a French-ruled England. He has a wife, a baby daughter, and a steady job, but he also has memories that do not belong to his life: flashes of streets where English is spoken freely, of a world that simply does not exist. Then a postcard arrives at the sorting office. It has been sitting there for ninety-one years, addressed to Joe. On the front is a lighthouse on a Scottish island called Eilean Mor. The lighthouse was built only six months ago. Joe has never left London. He does not know the person who sent it, yet the sender writes as though they know him well. Joe travels north to the Outer Hebrides, trying to understand what the postcard means and where those impossible memories come from. What he finds pulls him backward through time and into a fight over which version of history gets to survive. The emotional center is simple and sharp: one man trying to hold onto himself while the world keeps insisting he is someone else.
Genres: science-fiction, literary-fiction, historical-fiction, speculative-fiction, mystery-thriller
Vibes: atmospheric, disorienting, emotional, mysterious, thought-provoking
Tropes: identity-crisis, mystery-box, time-displacement, unreliable-reality
Setting: London, Eilean Mor, Outer Hebrides, Scotland, England
Period: 19th-century, 20th-century, 21st-century
448 pages · Paperback · Bloomsbury Publishing
Content warnings: slavery