In Thea Lim's An Ocean of Minutes, it's 1981 and a vicious flu pandemic has swept across the United States. With the advent of time travel, people are given the option of traveling to the future as migrant workers to pay for a loved one's treatment. When her boyfriend Frank gets sick, Polly agrees to go to 1993 and work in exchange for his cure. Though they planned to meet each other then and pick up where they left off, Frank is nowhere to be found. Polly realizes she has been rerouted to 1998 and is a slave to TimeRaiser, the company that hired her. Met with an unfamiliar and unforgiving landscape, Polly is determined to find Frank and build the future she'd imagined, rather than the one she's found.
Lim's mastery of plot, pacing and character shines in this high-concept novel. Striking a balance between the page-turning narrative and heartfelt, wistful insights, this novel depicts a future that reads more like an inspection of the contemporary moment than a fantastical assumption. Lim dives seamlessly through questions of race, gender, immigration and corporate monopoly, to surface with poignant discoveries about love, sacrifice, loss and ephemerality. Best of all, Lim's meditations on time illuminate the novel's shimmering and translucent surface to reveal fleetingly the depths and beauty of human emotion beneath. Polly's journey suggests both the beauty of and the inability to "stop right here, and stay in this very moment, for good." --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor