Description
THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
fiendishly clever, nostalgic, and tender novel about adolescence and middle age, expectation and anticipation, and how we must cherish what we have while there is still time . . .
If you could go back, would you do things differently?
Alice Stern isn’t ready to turn forty. She thought she’d have more time to figure it all out. Above all, she thought she’d have more time with her father, Leonard Stern, an eccentric novelist – but he’s lying in a hospital bed and Alice isn’t sure if she’ll hear his voice again.
When she falls asleep outside their old apartment on the night before her birthday, she’s surprised to be greeted the next morning by a much younger Leonard, with a sixteenth birthday card for a teenage Alice who, far from clinging to her youth, is hurtling towards adulthood…
Alice soon discovers how she got back here, to 1996 and her sixteenth birthday, and realises she can keep on coming, whenever she chooses. But faced each time with different versions of her life, and the consequences of her decisions, it’s on her not to lose sight of what she wants most: some time back with Leonard…
With her celebrated humour, insight, and heart, Emma Straub cleverly turns all the traditional time travel tropes on their head and delivers a different kind of love story – about the lifelong, reverberating relationship between a parent and child.
