Secondhand Daylight

Bacon (Ivory’s Story) and Hook (Interzone) bring a remarkable amount of compassion to this snappy time-bending tale. While dancing with a stranger in a hotel bar in 1990 Melbourne, Australia, slacker Green sees a blinding light and inexplicably jumps two hours forward in time. Then he skips forward by a week, sparking a fight with his best friend, whose barbecue he missed. Then six months, missing his father’s wedding. Though these accelerating jumps don’t seem to affect his aging, Green becomes increasingly desperate for a solution, posting online about his predicament in hopes that someone will help him before he “time jump[s], over and over, to a nothing future.” Meanwhile in 2045, Zada, head of the Safiri Project, a time travel research group run by the artificial intelligence AI Green, reads Green’s post and attempts to use the seventh-dimensional tesseract she and her team developed to propel herself back in time incrementally until she catches up with him. For all the time travel shenanigans, the story is deceptively clean and simple, brimming with both nostalgia and heart. Readers will have no trouble empathizing with these endearing characters as they search for meaning and connection across time and space. (Nov.)