EVERY ANXIOUS WAVE by Mo Daviau

Punk rock! True love! Weird science! Time-travel paradoxes! Mo Daviau’s debut novel is “A dark and funny love story” that uses a fantastical plot to ask big, dangerous questions about dreams, regret, and how “our best efforts to fix things often mess them up even more.”

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Good guy Karl Bender is a thirty-something bar owner whose life lacks love and meaning. When he stumbles upon a time-travelling worm hole in his closet, Karl and his best friend Wayne develop a side business selling access to people who want to travel back in time to listen to their favorite bands. It’s a pretty ingenious plan, until Karl, intending to send Wayne to 1980, transports him back to 980 instead. Though Wayne sends texts extolling the quality of life in tenth century “Mannahatta,” Karl is distraught that he can’t bring his friend back.

Enter brilliant, prickly, overweight astrophysicist, Lena Geduldig. Karl and Lena’s connection is immediate. While they work on getting Wayne back, Karl and Lena fall in love — with time travel, and each other. Unable to resist meddling with the past, Karl and Lena bounce around time. When Lena ultimately prevents her own long-ago rape, she alters the course of her life and threatens her future with Karl.

A high-spirited and engaging novel, EVERY ANXIOUS WAVE plays ball with the big questions of where we would go and who we would become if we could rewrite our pasts, as well as how to hold on to love across time.

PRAISE FOR EVERY ANXIOUS WAVE

“Every Anxious Wave gives us the intelligent irreverence of Nick Hornby, the honest romance of Gary Shteyngart, and the swoon-worthy charm of a John Cusack movie, all within a riveting story of lost love, bent time, and rock stars. A delightful, innovative debut.” —Rebecca Dinerstein, author of The Sunlit Night

“A bittersweet, century-hopping odyssey of love, laced with weird science, music geekery, and heart-wrenching laughs…the deeper it goes into Karl’s and Lena’s erratic trajectories ― past, present, and future ― the more it rings with a uniqueness that transcends the tropes of time travel and indie romance…a wise, witty, whipcrack sci-fi romp about how our passions can both lift us up and hold us back.” –NPR

“…a total punk rock time travel novel … Like Vonnegut’s best work, the book is whimsical and has a beating heart … This is, at root, a novel about how we find things we weren’t looking for, and that our best efforts to fix things often mess them up even more, but that it somehow turns out okay anyway.” —Mashable

“A punk-rock time-travel love story for the ages . . . Daviau is ferocious with her sad and flawed characters, whose pain propels the story through several iterations. Because the tale keeps changing with every visit to the future, the book doesn’t end the way even its characters expect it to but is satisfying nonetheless. A dark and funny love story that, like its main characters, is much sweeter than it appears on the surface.” —Kirkus

 

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mo Daviau proclaimed her life goal of publishing a novel at the age of eight. She is also a solo performer, having performed at storytelling shows such as Bedpost Confessions and the Soundtrack Series. She is a graduate of Smith College and the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan where her first novel, Every Anxious Wave, won a Hopwood Award.