Love and Other Paradoxes, the second time-travel novel from Catriona Silvey (Meet Me in Another Life), ponders the implications of knowing how the future will turn out and trying either to stay the course or to change it, pulling together profound questions and intense romance.
Joe Greene hasn't written a single poem since he arrived at Cambridge University, despite his dreams of becoming a renowned poet. Now in the final year of his degree, he faces the prospect of not graduating and retreating shamefully to his small, working-class village in Scotland. But then he runs into Esi, who has come from the future and escaped her time-travel tour group in an attempt to change her fate. She holds proof that, in the future, Joe does become a renowned poet and marries Diana, a famous actress who is, in Joe's present, also at Cambridge in the same year as Joe. Thinking his success is inevitable, Joe begins to spend even less time on his studies. After he approaches Diana and thoroughly embarrasses himself, Esi must help him win over Diana or risk endangering her own mission. As Joe and Esi work together, one attempting to save the future and the other to change it, their ideas about destiny, privilege, and love are tested and threaten--or promise--new paths for them both.
Silvey vividly portrays the inequities of an elite institution through Joe's working-class background, with additional inequities faced by Black people highlighted through Esi's story. The philosophical issues posed by the plot are fascinating, and the novel is a gorgeous read thanks to its fully rounded characters and their palpable emotional conflicts. --Dainy Bernstein, freelance reviewer