A literary multiverse story of love, loss, time travel, and final-stage capitalism, written by award-winning author Brenda Peynado.
Pocket World—a geographically small, hidden offshoot of our own reality, sped up or slowed down by time.
Following humanity’s discovery of pocket worlds, teams of academics embarked on groundbreaking exploratory missions, eager to study this new technology and harness the potential of a seemingly limitless horizon.
“What would you do, given another universe, a do-over?”
Archeologist Raquel and her wife Marlena once dreamed the pocket worlds held the key to solving the universe’s mysteries. But forty years later, pocket worlds are now controlled by corporations squeezing every penny out of all colonizable space and time, Raquel herself is in disgrace, and Marlena lives in her own pocket universe (that Raquel wears around her neck) and refuses to speak to her.
Standing in the ruins of her dream and her failed ideals, Raquel seizes one last chance to redeem herself and confront what it means to save something—or someone—from time.
"I was astonished by how many huge ideas could fit into this taut, swift novella by Brenda Peynado: it's all at once a meditation on motherhood, grief, war, environmental collapse, dread, and the nature of memory and time; yet the book is miraculously also buoyant, thrilling, a breathless and headlong read for a breathtaking time on this planet. I ate it up."
Lauren Groff, New York Times bestselling author
"At once an incredibly human story about family and sacrifice as well as a staggering work of anti-capitalist eco fiction, Time's Agent is heartbreaking, inspiring, genius."
Reactor
"Time's Agent is a gorgeous mediation on grief, colonialism, love and parenthood. Sharp and sparkling."
Lauren Beukes, bestselling author of The Shining Girls
