A River Called Time combines speculative fiction and alternative history to bring to life a disturbingly recognizable portrait of pressure-cooker existence in cities plagued by vast inequality. Courttia Newland, author of The Gospel According to Cane and screenwriter for two episodes of the Steve McQueen series Small Axe, imagines a world where colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade never took root and English-speakers occupy the very bottom rung of society. Newland's worldbuilding is dense and impressively detailed, incorporating many strange new technologies, but protagonist Markriss Denny's motivations are grounded as they come, at least at first. Markriss hopes to study his way out of his violent, impoverished home and into a city-sized building called the Ark where the inhabitants are presumed to live lives of ease and plenty.
Unfortunately for Markriss, his goal of upward mobility is complicated by an alarming and involuntary power: at unpredictable moments, his soul leaves his body in something between an out-of-body experience and astral projection. In this unbounded form, his soul can travel throughout the city and beyond the physical plane. It is here that Newland's novel takes a turn for the deeply strange, with Markriss encountering a long-deceased inventor in his astral travels who warns him of someone with a similar power and even greater ability. Markriss is charged with finding and stopping this person before his power can be used to wreak terrible havoc.
Markriss's abilities allow Newland to explore trippy, dream-like imagery: "So many lights were around him he felt warmed by their presence. Some darted at full velocity, others meandered.... So many luminescences, so many stars, so many colors, from orange to violet, peach to gray, swimming tropical fish in the vast sea of the solar system." His abilities also allow for a number of surprising narrative possibilities--suffice it to say that the novel has a few ambitious gear-shift moments where characters and events warp and change.
In some ways, A River Called Time asks a great deal of readers, but its rewards are manifold. Newland has managed to craft a narrative where the otherworldly coexists alongside more recognizable concerns, such as the spiritual cost of collaboration with an immoral system versus the very real costs of resistance. A River Called Time is ambitious, sprawling, unpredictable and fascinating. --Hank Stephenson, the Sun magazine, manuscript reader
Shelf Talker: A River Called Time is a relentlessly imaginative novel about a world where colonialism and slavery never occurred and yet brutal inequality persists.