This Time Tomorrow
Emma Straub's This Time Tomorrow, published in 2022, is a tender, funny, deeply felt novel about parents and children that uses the bones of a time-travel story to ask what we would say to the people we love if we could say it again. Alice Stern wakes on the morning of her fortieth birthday in her shoebox Upper West Side apartment, mildly hungover and unsatisfied with the polite, unremarkable adult life she has built. She lives alone, dates a fine man she does not quite love, holds a steady job in admissions at the elite Manhattan school where she once was a student, and visits her dying father, the once-famous time-travel novelist Leonard Stern, in his hospital bed every Sunday. After one too many drinks at a birthday gathering, Alice falls asleep in her old childhood bedroom on West 84th Street and wakes up on the morning of her sixteenth birthday in 1996, with her father young, healthy, and pouring coffee at the kitchen table. Straub uses Alice's repeated jumps back to the same week to explore grief, parenthood, the small choices that compound into a life, and the ferocious love between fathers and daughters. Warm, generous, and quietly devastating, This Time Tomorrow is one of her best.
What you might want to know about This Time Tomorrow
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
On the night of her fortieth birthday, Manhattan hospital admissions clerk Alice Stern goes drinking with her friend Sam, falls asleep at her childhood guardhouse on Pomander Walk, and wakes up sixteen years old in 1996, with her father Leonard alive and writing in the kitchen.
This Time Tomorrow was written by Emma Straub and published in 2022. Straub is also the author of Modern Lovers, All Adults Here, and The Vacationers. The metadata above lists Ngugi wa Thiong'o in error.
Yes. This Time Tomorrow uses a time-travel premise as the protagonist Alice wakes up on her 16th birthday in 1996 with the chance to revisit her teenage years and her relationship with her father.
This Time Tomorrow is 35 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, This Time Tomorrow takes most readers under an hour to finish.
This Time Tomorrow is a standalone novel by Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo, not part of a series.
This Time Tomorrow is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
