Hazards of Time Travel: A Novel

An ingenious, dystopian novel of one young woman’s resistance against the constraints of an oppressive society, from the inventive imagination of Joyce Carol Oates

“Time travel” — and its hazards—are made literal in this astonishing new novel in which a recklessly idealistic girl dares to test the perimeters of her tightly controlled (future) world and is punished by being sent back in time to a region of North America — “Wainscotia, Wisconsin”—that existed eighty years before.  Cast adrift in time in this idyllic Midwestern town she is set upon a course of “rehabilitation”—but cannot resist falling in love with a fellow exile and questioning the constrains of the Wainscotia world with results that are both devastating and liberating.  

Arresting and visionary, Hazards of Time Travel  is both a novel of harrowing discovery and an exquisitely wrought love story that may be Joyce Carol Oates’s most unexpected novel so far.

“Joyce Carol Oates reinvents the genre to create a brilliant story of love and exile.” - James Gleick

“Oates’s writing has always seemed effortless: urgent, unafraid, torrential. She writes like a woman who walks into rough country and doesn’t look back.” - New York Times Book Review

“A master of sharp dialogue and vibrant descriptions, Oates casts a powerful spell.” - People

“The most consistently inventive, brilliant, curious, and creative writer going, as far as I’m concerned.” - Gillian Flynn

“Oates is still casting some awfully dark magic.” - The Washington Post