This stunningly assured debut novel is an emotionally compelling and intellectually persuasive novel about the complex and infinite possibilities of life. Tom Barren, the lackluster, ever-disappointing son of a haughty, emotionally-insulated super-genius scientist, lives in a version of our world in which an incredible discovery in 1965 profoundly changed the course of history, creating a futuristic utopia free of conflict, where punk rock never existed because it was never needed. Mourning his recently deceased mother and Penelope, the girl of his dreams who has just broken his heart, Tom steals his father’s greatest invention and goes back in time to the moment of the world-changing discovery, his world erased in a fury of grief and stupidity as if it had never existed. Now stuck in our own 2015, he discovers a newly constituted version of his family and the woman he loved, and must decide whether to fix the flow of history, bring the billions of people living in edenic bliss back into existence and return to his natural dimension, or to try to make a life in our world where he has a girlfriend who just might believe his outrageous tale of alternate histories, a father who seems to genuinely love him, a mother who is very much not dead, and a soul mate of a sister who never existed in his original life. It is a story of friendship and family, of time machines and alternate realities, and of love in its multitude of forms