All Our Wrong Todays
A BBC Radio 2 Book Club Choice
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4.4 • 33 Ratings
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
'A witty, time-travelling romance' Maria Semple, author of Where'd You Go, Bernadette
This is a love story that could only happen because of an accident of time travel.
Tom and Penny belong to a world so perfect there's no war, no poverty, no under-ripe avocados.
But when something awful happens to Penny, and Tom tries to make it right, he accidentally destroys everything, waking up in our broken, dysfunctional world.
Only here, Penny and Tom have a second chance.
Should Tom go back to his brilliant but loveless existence, or risk everything by staying in our messy, complicated world for his one and only chance at true love?
'Thrilling and refreshingly optimistic' Andy Weir, author of The Martian
'Sharp and funny' Daily Mail
'It's a Wonderful Life meets The Jetsons' Buzzfeed
'All Our Wrong Todays is an entertaining romp that should appeal to fans The Time Traveler's Wife' The Guardian, BEST RECENT SCIENCE FICTION
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Canadian author Elan Mastai’s first novel makes time travel hip. It’s the story of a slacker named Tom living in an alternate reality that’s as fizzy and hopeful as The Jetsons, thanks to a major scientific breakthrough that’s harnessed the energy of the Earth’s rotation to create unlimited clean energy and free humans to live healthy, carefree lives. But when Tom messes with his estranged father’s pioneering technology, he upsets history. All Our Wrong Todays is a fun sci-fi romp with a humanist heart.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
