The 23rd Hero (Unabridged‪)‬

NEW YORK TIMES essayist and 2024 Reader’s Choice Award winner Rebecca Anne Nguyen’s stunning debut. In The 23rd Hero, an ordinary woman with an extraordinary memory travels back in time to 16th century France to stop climate change before it starts and return to the man she loves.

In a world ravaged by climate change, a mysterious time travel agency known as the Program sends carefully selected Heroes back in time on missions to prevent environmental damage before it happens. Sloane Burrows secretly longs to be a Hero and restore the natural world of her childhood—a world she can envision with absolute clarity because of her superpower memory. But her father raised Sloane to believe her “freak memory” is a shameful flaw that should be hidden from the world. Sloane stuffs her dream of being a Hero and conceals her memory to the point of making herself sick. Her only respite from the shame is the recurring dream she’s been having for nearly a decade. In it, a breathtakingly beautiful man makes her feel accepted in a way she never has in waking life—not despite her memory, but because of it. But when the man in the dream shows up in real life, Sloane’s world is turned upside down. Not only is Bastian a flesh-and-blood person, but he’s from the Program, and he wants her to do the one thing that will shatter her chances of winning her dad’s love: become a Hero, travel back in time to sixteenth-century France, and use her superpower memory to save the world.