Thirty One Times the City Drowned

About this book

Thirty One Times the City Drowned is a warm, angry, finally uplifting novel about the limits of rescue, told through a small society of ordinary people who can step back into their own lifetimes and who have agreed, for their own protection, to use it only for the smallest possible good. Marisa Duarte is thirty four, teaches geography at a state school, and inherited from her grandmother an ability she spent two years assuming was a psychiatric symptom. The travellers found her, as they find everybody, by noticing a pattern of small unexplained kindnesses, and they brought her in, and gave her the rules, and for four years she was perfectly happy: a returned document, a warned driver, a misdiagnosis caught, a child moved away from a window. Small mercies. Never anything big. The reason for the rule, she is told, is safety, and the reason is a lie, or at least a very old and comfortable half truth.