Rushlights

The Secret History meets Cloud Atlas in this dizzyingly brilliant literary speculative debut, following a group of people who find each other across time. Jude—college senior, research assistant, and part-time gas station attendant—has never felt at ease in the world. When she meets Marceline, a fellow student in her psychology seminar who is similarly interested in the thin line between memory and experience, she initially seems like exactly the kind of person Jude both envies and disdains: wealthy, worldly, well-read. But Marceline seems to hint at some shared history between the two of them, a history Jude doesn’t remember. As Jude falls into Marceline’s world, she’s drawn into the orbit of the enigmatic Kerr, the aloof Cash, the absent Oliver, and the mysterious Helena, and begins to realize that their long and tangled connections extend far beyond the bounds of campus and deep into the past and future. What binds them together is an expanded relationship to time itself; anchored to one another, they’re able to slip across places, bodies, and centuries—and they claim that Jude has always been one of them, in this lifetime and beyond. As she struggles to uncover her own memories—and navigate complicated relationships with both Marceline and Kerr—Jude begins to realize that she holds the key to understanding a terrifying future. Spanning from a college campus in 2008, to seventh century Wales, eighteenth century Turkey, a post-Civil War American west, a Victorian asylum, the year 2111, and a still more elusive future in which kudzu is the only organism left alive, Rushlights is an expansive, dazzling novel that introduces a major new voice.