About the book

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 recognises two visitors she wasn't supposed to see, she realises 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, jeopardising the future and her place in it.

Why we loved it

Imagine this… you live in a valley nestled between a lake and a mountain range. Cross the mountains to the east and you’ll find yourself 20 years in the future in an identical valley to the one you just left. Cross the lake to the west and you’ll find yourself 20 years in the past. And so one and so on, every identical valley set between a mountain and a lake, a future and a past. 

Imagine knowing older and younger versions of yourself and everyone you’ve ever known exist simultaneously, just a short trip away.

Travel between past and future is both possible and allowed, but strictly controlled and on a proviso of absolute non-interference - an elderly grandparent who wishes to see the grandchild they’ll never live to meet perhaps, or grieving parent wanting to see the face of a child one last time.

That’s the premise of The Other Valley, with an entire society and culture built and developed around the use and prohibition of time-travel.

Written by Canadian author Scott Alexander Howard, this is a refreshingly unusual take on the concept of time travel, where futuristic technology or magic is more usually the mechanism for travel. In this novel, it’s all just about geography and I find that fascinating.

Our introduction to this world is through 16 year old, Odile Ozanne, a young introverted girl with a promising future ahead of her until a chance encounter with visitors from the east takes her on a different path from that expected. But is it the right path? Would you change the world to change your own fate? And to what extent does non-interference in someone else's fate make us culpable to everything that befalls them?

This is a smart and thought-provoking story that's just impossible to put down once you get stuck in.

My only criticism is that the author never mentions what lies to the north and to south - this enquiring mind would like to know!