This Time Tomorrow
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- €9.99
Publisher Description
Brought to you by Penguin.
A fiendishly clever, nostalgic, and tender novel about adolescence and middle age, expectation and anticipation, and how we must cherish what we have while there is still time . . .
If you could go back, would you do things differently?
Alice Stern isn't ready to turn forty. She thought she'd have more time to figure it all out. Above all, she thought she'd have more time with her father, Leonard Stern, an eccentric novelist - but he's lying in a hospital bed and Alice isn't sure if she'll hear his voice again.
When she falls asleep outside their old apartment on the night before her birthday, she's surprised to be greeted the next morning by a much younger Leonard, with a sixteenth birthday card for a teenage Alice who, far from clinging to her youth, is hurtling towards adulthood . . .
Alice soon discovers how she got back here, to 1996 and her sixteenth birthday, and realises she can keep on coming, whenever she chooses. But faced each time with different versions of her life, and the consequences of her decisions, it's on her not to lose sight of what she wants most: some time back with Leonard . . .
With her celebrated humour, insight, and heart, Emma Straub cleverly turns all the traditional time travel tropes on their head and delivers a different kind of love story - about the lifelong, reverberating relationship between a parent and child.
'I just finished This Time Tomorrow and I'm crying at its message and its honestly and its utter beauty. And now I have to go call my mom' Jodi Picoult
'A gorgeous and witty storyteller' Liane Moriarty
'A master of the domestic ensemble drama' Time
© Emma Straub 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
What would you change if you could transport yourself back to your 16th birthday on the day you turn 40? That’s the question at the heart of Emma Straub’s sweet 2022 novel This Time Tomorrow. It introduces us to Alice Stern, a woman working in the admissions office of elite Upper West Side school Belvedere, where she was once a student. At 39, Alice hasn’t quite had the career she once hoped for, nor has she found a partner or had children (but she’s kind of OK with that). She’s also dealing with the terminal illness of her author father Leonard, her North Star who she totally cherishes. Then, she hits 40, and everything changes: after celebrating in a bar alone, she somehow slips through time, waking up in the ’90s on the morning of her 16th birthday. Her father is still fit and healthy—and the boy she loved back then, Tommy, has just walked back into her life. So she begins to wonder: what if she could change that day and alter her future? More importantly, might her trip back into the past hold the keys to saving her father in the present day? What unfolds is unexpected and moving, a beautiful portrait of a father-daughter relationship which explores grief, regret and the tiny decisions that can end up shaping an entire life. Also laced with the author’s boundless love of New York, This Time Tomorrow is a genuine treat that you’ll want to both speed through and savour.
