West is twenty years in the past.

East is twenty years in the future.

Would you travel through time to save the one you love?

Sixteen-year-old Odile Ozanne is a quiet girl, but everyone knows she’s destined to land a coveted seat on the Conseil. If she does, she’ll decree who gets to be escorted past the town’s heavily guarded border and across the mountains into the next valley over. It’s the same valley, the same town, however, to the east, the town is twenty years ahead in time. To the west, it’s twenty years behind. The towns repeat in an endless sequence across the wilderness. The only border crossings permitted are mourning tours: secretive viewings of the dead in towns where the dead are still alive.

Odile will surely pass the Conseil’s vetting, but when she happens upon a mourning tour she wasn’t supposed to see, she realizes it’s for her friend Edme – a boy who’s so funny and light, a violin virtuoso at just sixteen, the first boy to even see Odile, to really like her.... And it’s Edme who’s going to die. Sworn to secrecy by the Conseil, Odile finds herself drawn into a devastating lifelong dilemma – to preserve the town’s carefully protected timeline, or to risk everything and try to rescue her one chance at happiness.

For fans of Emily St John Mandel and Kazuo Ishiguro, an exhilarating literary speculative novel about an isolated town neighboured by its own past and future, and a young girl who faces an impossible choice.