352 pages
Published July 10, 2016 by Crown.
One night after an evening out, Jason Dessen, forty-year-old physics professor living with his wife and son in Chicago, is kidnapped at gunpoint by a masked man, driven to an abandoned industrial site and injected with a powerful drug. As he wakes, a man Jason's never met smiles down at him and says, "Welcome back, my friend." But this life is not the one he knows. His wife is not his wife; his son was never born; and he's not an ordinary college professor, but a celebrated genius who has achieved something impossible. Is it this world or the other that's the dream? How can he possibly make it back to the family he loves? The answers lie in a journey more wondrous and horrifying than anything he could have imagined--one that will force him to confront the darkest parts of himself as he battles a terrifying, seemingly unbeatable foe. …
One night after an evening out, Jason Dessen, forty-year-old physics professor living with his wife and son in Chicago, is kidnapped at gunpoint by a masked man, driven to an abandoned industrial site and injected with a powerful drug. As he wakes, a man Jason's never met smiles down at him and says, "Welcome back, my friend." But this life is not the one he knows. His wife is not his wife; his son was never born; and he's not an ordinary college professor, but a celebrated genius who has achieved something impossible. Is it this world or the other that's the dream? How can he possibly make it back to the family he loves? The answers lie in a journey more wondrous and horrifying than anything he could have imagined--one that will force him to confront the darkest parts of himself as he battles a terrifying, seemingly unbeatable foe. --
I think it’s very difficult to write a multiverse story (similar to grandfather paradoxes, which I’ve also read a lot of - especially in Doctor Who) and this is a prime example of why sci-fi authors should steer clear. It’s confusing, doesn’t make sense, and the last third of the book is unbelievably depressing. I only finished this because it was for a book club.
What an amazing book! The ending was a bit rushed, or a bit incomplete but overall a great read.
This was a superb, un-putdownable work attempting to answer that old chestnut: what of the life unlived, the path unchosen?
Even though our lead is a genius, I never felt over my head - perhaps because he's taken the family path in favour of becoming something of a driven puritan, but more likely because Crouch can write clever characters without losing their warmth and Humanity. This is another of those works that attempts to plebify quantum entanglement and the theory of the multiverse. And you know what? It does it very, very well indeed.
