Shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the James Tiptree Jr. Award, this literary science-fiction novel by award-winning author Lisa Tuttle is ‘a brilliant exploration of the relationship between quantum mechanics, human choice and alternate worlds’ The Oxford Times
Sometimes, those roads not taken can come back and haunt you.
Clare’s unhappy life hasn’t gone the way she expected. At the age of thirty-three she’s still an accountant, still unmarried and ridden with guilt over the tragic death of her brother. Her obsession with roads not taken drives her into a nervous breakdown, until she comes to realise that she can leave her unsatisfactory “real life” behind and enter alternate realities where things worked out better.
But when she explores these other existences, she discovers they are far from the perfect lives she was imagining, and wherever she turns, another Clare usurps her own existence, until she is forced into the ultimate confrontation with madness – and truth . . .
Sometimes, those roads not taken can come back and haunt you.
Clare’s unhappy life hasn’t gone the way she expected. At the age of thirty-three she’s still an accountant, still unmarried and ridden with guilt over the tragic death of her brother. Her obsession with roads not taken drives her into a nervous breakdown, until she comes to realise that she can leave her unsatisfactory “real life” behind and enter alternate realities where things worked out better.
But when she explores these other existences, she discovers they are far from the perfect lives she was imagining, and wherever she turns, another Clare usurps her own existence, until she is forced into the ultimate confrontation with madness – and truth . . .
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Reviews
Lisa Tuttle has been writing remarkable, chilling short stories and powerful, haunting novels for many years now, and doing it so easily and so well that one almost takes it, and her, for granted
[Lisa Tuttle] has a prize-winning knack of doing what a lot of fantasy writers can only dream of: making the impossible seem everyday, and writing legend in such a way that it seems like a very present and nerve-tingling possibility
So intense, so compelling, so emotionally real, that the effect is mind-altering. It has not stopped haunting me since I read it