This Time Tomorrow

Best-selling novelist Straub (All Adults Here) uses time travel to imagine how decisions influence future selves—or not. Alice is celebrating her 40th birthday. She is relatively happy, although she wonders whether she could have made better choices along the way. Her father, Leonard, is dying of an undiagnosed illness, causing Alice grief and anxiety. After a birthday binge at a subway bar, Alice goes to her childhood home. Once there, she can’t find her keys, so she settles down in the property’s garden shack, where she falls asleep. She then wakes up in her childhood bed on her 16th birthday in 1996, 24 years earlier. She finds her father hale and hearty, just as he had been. With her 16-year-old body and her 40-year-old perspective, life choices take on a different meaning. Alice learns she can travel back and forth to this one day anytime. In her many subsequent visits to the past, she tries out different decisions to see how they change the future. This remarkable story addresses the hopes and fears of every adult. Narrator Marin Ireland deftly portrays a wide range of emotions that drive the story.