Retro
For fans of YESTERYEAR and FLEABAG
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
✨ DISCOVER THE ZEITGEISTY TIME TRAVEL DEBUT WITH A TWIST ✨
'Funny and sharp'
GRAZIA
'I want to travel back so I can read it again for the first time!'
Casey Scieszka, author of The Fountain
'So much fun!'
Holly Gramazio, author of The Husbands
EVER WANTED TO TRAVEL INTO THE PAST? WELL NOW YOU CAN!*
*exclusions and exorbitant fees apply.
Ash is a failed actress who is done trying to ‘make’ something of her life when she scrolls past an ad for Retro. The algorithm thinks she can afford recreational time travel? Then she sees the caption: Come away with us! We’re hiring.
Time Travel Agents, the guides who lead ultra-wealthy explorers on trips to the past on the ‘Retro Metro’, must blend seamlessly into any historical period. Ash is a perfect fit. She’s an actress after all. Or at least she used to be.
So begins Ash’s life at Retro, chaperoning rich tourists through history’s most Instagrammable eras. She wrangles bachelorette parties chasing hunky cowboys in the Old West, throws ‘'20s for your twenties’ birthday bashes at speakeasies, and rolls her eyes at Wall Street men trying their luck in the Gold Rush.
For the first time in years, Ash’s life feels enviable. She barely notices the strange glitches in her memory or the way her present-day relationships are starting to slip.
But as the trips intensify and her present begins to fray, Ash confronts an unsettling question: Was diving into the past ever really an escape, or just another way to lose herself?
***
'A magnetic read—equal parts charming, melancholy, and strange—perfect for those with sharp tongues but yearning hearts.' Emily Hunt Kivel, author of Dwelling
'Shrewd, witty and original' Aisling Rawle, author of The Compound
'Retro provides a whip smart critique of influencer culture and the ultrawealthy, while being utterly readable and compelling' Tasha Coryell, author of Love Letters to a Serial Killer
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Goldstein explores the possibilities of time-travel tourism in her inventive if overlong debut. Ash, an unemployed actor pushing 30, doomscrolls her way to a job posting by Retro, a luxury vacation agency offering "recreational time travel." Hired as a Time Travel Agent, she sets off for new Destinations with her charges, including a bachelorette party seeking thrills in the Wild West and finance bros hoping to strike it rich during the Gold Rush. Employees are allowed to ride the company's time-traveling train, called the Retro Metro, during their free time, and Ash jumps at the chance, excited to regale her best friend, an emerging movie star, with stories of her travels. There are troubling aspects, internally known as "continuity errors," to the service Retro provides, as when Ash returns from a trip to 1937 Los Angeles with a scar missing from her arm. The more irregularities Ash hears about, the more she suspects Retro of burying a darker truth about time travel. Goldstein packs in too much—Ash has a doomed relationship with a long-dead private investigator she met in the trip to 1937 L.A., plus a possible romance with a colleague—but the novel makes hay of America's persistent frontier myths and obsession with pioneering, especially in the surprising third act. Readers will find it worth the ride.
