The Possibilities

May 8, 2023
Goldstein-Love’s engaging sophomore novel (after The Passion of Tasha Darsky) blends an intimate view of new motherhood with an ingenious story of a multiverse. After suspense writer Hannah Bennett delivers her son, Jack, 10 minutes pass before his first breath. In that time, she sees another outcome, in which he turns blue and dies. Eight months later, with Jack breathing normally, Hannah is diagnosed with adjustment disorder and her husband declares he’s leaving her. Then she leaves Jack unattended for a moment while outside the house, during which she’s faced with two realities simultaneously—her life as she knows it, and the “Jackless” alternative she’s always feared. That night, Jack disappears from his crib, setting Hannah on a race against the clock to find him before he’s erased forever. When she follows up with the police who responded to her call about Jack’s disappearance, however, they have no memory of the case or her child. The author plumbs the depths of her protagonist’s conflicted emotions, showing how Hannah is split between a desire to preserve her sense of self before Jack and the pull to give herself over to her new identity as a mother. The result is a memorable story about the limits of a parent’s ability to protect their child from harm. Agent: Sarah Burnes, Gernert Co.

June 1, 2023
For new mom Hannah, motherhood is both immensely satisfying and deeply terrifying. From the moment her son was born she has had glimpses of a version of her life where he didn't survive his birth. With the help of a therapist, she is coming to understand that this is just a manifestation of her sleep deprivation and anxiety--or is it? When one day she returns to her son after a brief moment to find his stroller has disappeared, Hannah begins to question whether she's hallucinating or actually getting a peek into alternate versions of her life that don't include her son. A unique and clever mash-up of sf and relationship fiction, this compelling novel explores the joys and fears of being a parent through Hannah's quest to find the truth and her son. Imagine if The Push (2021), by Ashley Audrain, met Recursion (2019), by Blake Crouch, with a sprinkling of This Time Tomorrow (2022), by Emma Straub.

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June 1, 2023
A mother whose infant son goes missing must cross over into other versions of her life in an attempt to find her baby. Hannah Bennett is a successful novelist with a proclivity for scary stories; her career has netted her a big house in the Berkeley Hills and a levelheaded husband, Adam. Since a traumatic experience eight months ago when her son, Jack, was born, unbreathing, via emergency C-section, Hannah can't shake what she and her therapist called the "car-swerve" feeling: an overwhelming anxiety, as in a near miss while driving, that something that could have ended in tragedy was narrowly avoided. Indeed, this pervasive anxiety is so severe that Hannah can no longer conjure scary stories on the page--what greater fear is there than being a new mother?--and overwhelmed Adam is ready to pull the plug on their marriage. But soon Hannah's fears take on a terrifying, concrete reality: She begins experiencing moments when she seems to inhabit a version of her life where Jack died at birth. One evening, after a day full of these alternate-life visions, Hannah and Adam find Jack vanished from his crib. As she desperately searches for Jack, Hannah realizes that it is precisely these moments of crossing into a parallel reality--she calls it "riding the possibilities"--that may hold the key not only to finding Jack, but to making sense of her own dark past. This novel bears many tropes of quantum-mechanics narratives--collisions of multiple versions of the self, characters puzzling over subatomic particles and "the many worlds"--but the story's inventiveness lies in the way it finds an SF narrative analog for the disorientation of postpartum psychology. The author, a psychotherapist herself, has orchestrated quite a mashup of genres, to page-turning effect. Part thriller, part psychology, part quantum physics--all fun.

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