The Other Valley

'Astonishingly brilliant. My book of the year.' Liz Nugent, Sunday Times-bestselling author of Strange Sally Diamond For fans of Emily St John Mandel and Kazuo Ishiguro, an exhilarating novel about an isolated town neighboured by its own past and future, and a young girl who faces an impossible choice... Would you sacrifice the future for love? Sixteen-year-old Odile vies for a coveted seat on an elite council that decides who may cross her town's heavily guarded borders. 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. When Odile recognizes two visitors she wasn't supposed to see, she realizes that the parents of her friend Edme have been escorted across the border from the future, on a mourning tour, to view their son while he's still alive in Odile's present. Edme-who is brilliant, funny, and the only person to truly know Odile-is going to die. Sworn to secrecy to preserve the timeline, Odile now becomes the top candidate. Yet she finds herself drawing closer to the doomed boy, jeopardizing the future and her place in it.

Scott Alexander Howard has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto, where he wrote an award-winning dissertation on literary emotions and the passage of time. His articles have appeared in journals such as Philosophical Quarterly and Analysis. Upon completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard, he decided to pursue fiction. He now lives in Vancouver.