Novel
I Wish I Could Go Back
Details
Novel
Status
Seeking Representation
272 pages
Language
English
About this book
I wish I could go back.
Clara Doubleday has thought it so many times the words no longer feel like words. She is thirty-six, a product lead at a London tech company, married, mother to a two-year-old. Her inbox is spiralling. Her body hurts. The timer keeps ticking and nothing stops long enough for her to breathe.
One morning she wakes and she is no longer thirty-six.
At twenty-six she has no child, just a boyfriend and a career and all the freedom she thought she wanted. At forty-six she is married but childless, living in a pristine London penthouse where nothing interrupts and nothing matters. At sixteen she stands at the last moment before her life took shape, watching a door she did not know was closing.
Each life looks like an answer. None of them are.
One chapter follows Martin, Clara’s husband, at sixteen in Japan, where an encounter with an elderly coffee master quietly introduces the question the novel carries throughout: what makes a life weigh something? Another brings Clara into a parallel present where her daughter is thirteen and the distance between them is one she cannot cross.
The final chapter returns Clara to her own timeline and follows her forward, all the way to eighty-six.
A sharp, tender novel about the lives we fantasise about, the one we keep leaving, and the courage it takes to stay.