'Astonishingly brilliant. My book of the year.' Liz Nugent Sunday Times -bestselling author
of Strange Sally Diamond For fans of Emily St John Mandel and Kazuo Ishiguro an
exhilarating literary speculative novel about an isolated town neighboured by its own past and
future and a young girl who faces an impossible choice... Sixteen-year-old Odile Ozanne is
an awkward quiet girl but everyone knows she's destined to land a coveted seat on the
Conseil. In her apprenticeship she competes to become one of the judges to decide who amongst
the town's residents may travel across the border. If she earns the position she'll decree who
may be escorted deep into the woods who may cross the border's barbed wire fence who may make
the arduous trek over the western mountain range - or perhaps the eastern range-to descend into
the next valley over. It's the same valley the same town. However 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. The only border crossings permitted by the Conseil are
mourning tours: furtive viewings of the dead in towns where the dead are still alive. Odile
wise beyond her years will surely pass the Conseil's vetting. But when she happens upon a
mourning tour she wasn't supposed to see she realizes her dear friend Edme's parents have
crossed the border from the east from twenty years in the future to view their son still
alive in Odile's present. Edme who's so funny and light. Edme who's a violin virtuoso at just
sixteen. Edme who's the first boy to even see Odile to really like her.... And it's Edme
who's going to die. Sworn to secrecy by the Conseil in order to preserve the timeline Odile
finds herself drawn even closer to the doomed boy. When Edme dies far sooner than Odile expects
when she does nothing to thwart his fate she's deeply shaken. The loss her foreknowledge the
weight of her rare and varied grief all throw Odile's own future her adult life into a
devastating downward spiral. If your soul was stricken by the years your teeth bloodied from
all of life's blows would you risk being seen by the armed patrols would you gamble with
everyone's lives with your own with the annihilation of an entire timeline to hike across the
border and get back to where it all went wrong?
