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Summary
Summary
One of Wall Street Journal's Best of 2017
"Entertainingly mixes thrills and humor." -- Entertainment Weekly
"[An] amazing debut novel. . . . Dazzling and complex. . . . Fearlessly funny storytelling." --The Washington Post
"Instantly engaging. . . . A timeless, if mind-bending, story about the journeys we take, populated by friends, family, lovers, and others, that show us who we might be, could be--and maybe never should be--that eventually leads us to who we are." -- USA Today
Elan Mastai's acclaimed debut novel is a story of friendship and family, of unexpected journeys and alternate paths, and of love in its multitude of forms.
It's 2016, and in Tom Barren's world, technology has solved all of humanity's problems -- there's no war, no poverty, no under-ripe avocadoes. Unfortunately, Tom isn't happy. He's lost the girl of his dreams. And what do you do when you're heartbroken and have a time machine? Something stupid.
Finding himself stranded in a terrible alternate reality -- which we immediately recognize as our 2016 -- Tom is desperate to fix his mistake and go home. Right up until the moment he discovers wonderfully unexpected versions of his family, his career, and the woman who may just be the love of his life.
Now Tom faces an impossible choice. Go back to his perfect but loveless life. Or stay in our messy reality with a soulmate by his side. His search for the answer takes him across continents and timelines in a quest to figure out, finally, who he really is and what his future -- our future -- is supposed to be.
Filled with humor and heart and packed with insight, intelligence, and mind-bending invention, All Our Wrong Todays is a powerful and moving story of life, loss, and love.
Author Notes
Elan Mastai was born in Vancouver and lives in Toronto with his wife and children. He is an award-winning screenwriter. This is his first novel.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Mastai's imaginative debut novel, Tom Barren's version of 2016 is a technological utopia based on a model popularized by 1950s science fiction. There are flying cars, robot maids, jet packs, teleportation, ray guns, and space vacations. Thanks to an experimental time machine, Tom travels back to the moment this glorious future was born-the 1965 invention of the Goettreider Engine, a clean-energy source that transformed mankind. Unfortunately, Tom's presence causes the experiment to go haywire. He disappears, and when he rematerializes he is in an alternate timeline, socially and technologically backward-in other words, our own 2016. Horrified at what he sees, Tom tries to come to terms with his new environment, which is only made bearable by a bookstore owner named Penny, with whom he promptly falls in love. In order to prove to her where he is really from, Tom is forced to track down the scientist who invented the clean-energy device. From here, the story takes several startling turns as Tom tries to make things right by using another time machine to change the future of this timeline. Mastai has fun with all the usual conventions of time travel and its many paradoxes, and the cherry on top is his dialogue, reminiscent of Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Agent: Simon Lipskar, Writers House. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Tom Barren has come from the 2016 we're supposed to be living in. He is the first chrononaut, a time traveler who has just landed in 1965 at the inception of the most amazing invention that ever (sort of) was: the engine that harnessed the velocity of earth's rotation to power the world. Unfortunately, Tom's very presence he is invisible, but he neglected to make himself undetectable, in unauthorized haste throws off the whole process, and before he boomerangs back to 2016, the world as he knew it is forever changed. Where are all the amazing gadgets and buildings people made, no longer needing to worry about fuel? Why is everyone calling him John? Though he immediately falls in love, and he likes this version of his family better in this 2016, Tom's mishap weighs heavily on him, and he thinks he should correct it. This is barely the beginning of the story Tom tells conversationally, acknowledging that it is utterly uncontainable in short, sparking chapters. Screenwriter Mastai fills his debut with vintage-sf-novel-fueled names and explanations to anticipate readers' every question; they'll enjoy the ride.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2016 Booklist
Guardian Review
In The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch (Headline, £14.99), NCIS agent Shannon Moss looks into the murder of a family and the abduction of their teenage daughter: the prime suspect is a Navy Seal who was lost on a deep space mission years earlier. Agent Moss works on a black ops programme that utilises time travel as an aid to its investigations, and she journeys into the future in order to track down the kidnapped girl and the killer. As if this were not a thrilling enough premise, Sweterlitsch stirs an intriguing end-of-the-world scenario into the mix. In every possible future investigated by naval agents, the world has come to an end and the Terminus event is destined to destroy Mosss timeline, too. How the murder inquiry and the enigma of the terminal event are linked is just one of the many enjoyable aspects of this dark, page-turning SF thriller; another is the character of Moss. Driven by the loss of a childhood friend and her own traumas in adulthood, she is a resilient, vulnerable and likable protagonist. Embers of War (Titan, £7.99), Gareth L Powells sixth novel and the opening volume of a trilogy, tells a familiar tale: a war criminal assumes a new identity and runs for cover, with various parties in hot pursuit. When a starship liner is shot down in a far-flung star system, Captain Sal Konstanz is tasked with rescuing survivors, and an opposing agent is sent to find the war criminal who was aboard the liner. So far so simple, but Powell skilfully complicates the situation in a compulsively readable, expansive space opera with huge alien artefacts in the form of the Gallery (a solar system whose planets have been individually carved into colossal monuments), an ancient extraterrestrial race whose quiescent power is about to be reawakened and a sentient starship with a conscience. Its the way he forms a series of first-person narratives into a compelling and satisfying whole that lifts the book far above most run-around space capers. Another novel that sounds simplistic in precis but reveals its depths in the telling is The Bitter Twins by Jen Williams (Headline, £14.99), the second volume of the Winnowing Flame trilogy. This fantasy saga should win converts to a genre in which dragons, eldritch monsters, battles between good and evil and perilous quests have become cliches. Williams deploys all these, but brings her dark and immersive narrative to life with vivid descriptive passages, a great line in sarcastic humour and human insight. The monstrous Jurelia are once again threatening to destroy the empire of Ebora, and the only hope of defeating them is to train and deploy the griffin-like war beasts. It falls to fell-witch Noon and swaggering sword-for-hire Tormalin to meld them into an effective fighting force. While The Bitter Twins could be read as a stand-alone, readers are advised to begin with the first book, The Ninth Rain. Spare and Found Parts by Sarah Maria Griffin (Titan, £8.99) is set 100 years after The Turn brought a terrible epidemic to an unnamed but thinly disguised Ireland. The country is divided into the Pale and the Pasture: the Pale is inhabited by citizens missing body parts, while the Pasture is a paradisal realm populated by those given biomechanical prostheses by Dr Julian Crane. His neglected daughter, Nell who was born without a heart, but given a clockwork one by her father is maudlin but spirited, and grows up in a draconian society where technology is proscribed. After finding a mechanical hand washed up on the beach, Nell dreams of creating an android companion who might understand her, but she lives in a society where computer code is considered evil. Spare and Found Parts is a truly original creation: part magical realism, part steampunk, its a coming-of-age allegory that examines technological progress and an individuals place in a stratified society. Thanks to the invention of the Goettreider Engine in 1965, which creates limitless power from the Earths rotation, the world of 2016 is a post-scarcity utopia. Tom Barren, the narrator of Elan Mastais first novel, All Our Wrong Todays (Penguin, £7.99), is a thirtysomething without ambition or much of a future. He is employed on a time travel project and thats when the problems begin. After a tragic incident, Barren whisks himself back in time in an attempt to change the future, only to deprive the world of the Goettreider Engine. On returning to the year 2016, he finds himself inhabiting not the utopia of his own timeline but, as it seems to him, the dystopia of our own reality. What follows is an imbroglio of temporal shenanigans as Barren attempts to locate Lionel Goettreider and make amends. All Our Wrong Todays is an entertaining romp that should appeal to fans of The Time Travelers Wife. - Eric Brown.
Library Journal Review
This debut novel is built on a clever premise: the "real" present actually was a technological wonder, as visualized in postwar America. It was a world where every problem was solved by technology; a universe of flying cars and synthetic solutions. This was the actual present, but the narrator, Tom Barron, erased it when he altered the time line by mistake. Our current state of technology pales by comparison. The novel goes on to show how Tom screwed up and in doing so casts a distinct contrast between Tom in the techno-future and his character as he ends up in our time. Here he inherits a better life, just not "his" life. In describing the narrator's attempt to fix his "mistake," Mastai creates a fascinating tapestry of interconnected alternate realities. Particularly creepy is the introduction of the specter of a third, even darker possibility, which leavens the plot. VERDICT A potent mixture of sincere introspection and a riveting examination of time travel and alternate realities, this highly recommended novel is reminiscent of Jo Walton's My Real Children with the breeziness of Robin Sloan's Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. [See Prepub Alert, 8/22/16.]-Henry Bankhead, San Rafael P.L., CA © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.