Emma Straub

After Astrid Strick - a widowed, 68-year-old mother of three living in upstate New York - witnesses an accident, she resolves to live more honestly. Starting with the mistakes she made in raising her family. But are her kids, tangled in their own messy adult lives, really ready to be treated like grown ups?

Twenty years later and they were supposed to be grown-ups... Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. Summer in the city... College friends Elizabeth, Zoe and Andrew had a band, grew up, settled in New York and now they were still living round the corner from one another (and in each other's pockets). One hot summer as their kids come of age, making those first hesitant steps into adulthood, it's the parents who find that the lives they've so carelessly stitched together begin to slowly unravel...

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.