"Time travel" - and its hazards-are made literal in this astonishing new novel in which a recklessly idealistic girl dares to test the perimeters of her tightly controlled (future) world and is punished by being sent back in time to a region of North America - "Wainscotia, Wisconsin"-that existed eighty years before. Cast adrift in time in this idyllic Midwestern town she is set upon a course of "rehabilitation"-but cannot resist falling in love with a fellow exile and questioning the constrains of the Wainscotia world with results that are both devastating and liberating.
Arresting and visionary, Hazards of Time Travel is both a novel of harrowing discovery and an exquisitely wrought love story that may be Joyce Carol Oates's most unexpected novel so far.
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[In the restricted zone, the Exiled Individual (EI) is allowed a ten-mile radius of movement the epicentre of which is the official residence of the EI]***
(Fourth Estate Ltd, 29 November 2018, hardback, 336 pages, Around The Year In 52 Books 2019, a book by an author who has more than one book on your TBR, bought from @AmazonUK)
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Another treat from JCO, one of my favourite writers, literary science fiction (who knew there was such a thing?). Adriane lives in a repressive future world which eerily echoes contemporary America under Trump. I love book about time travel so this was a treat. What impressed me about the book is how normal what happens to Adriane is. She's arrested for treason and sent into exile - transported 80 years into the past. If she's a good girl for her four year sentence she will be transported back if she breaks the rules she will be deleted (vaporised). This is conveyed as if this is all perfectly ordinary. There are no spaceships or crafts to transport or devices of any kind. There's something I really like about the way this is done. This book is chilling, fascinating and disturbing in equal measures. I loved it. Adriane finds some kind of solace and comfort in her new life as an exile. Then there is a moment when she gets a harsh reminder of the rules of life as an exile. The ending is not what I expected but I loved it.