For fans of Outlander, a new cli-fi, time travel adventure about a woman on a race through history to save the world is hitting shelves this summer. With a heart-pounding love story at its core, this book is for science fiction and romance lovers alike.

The 23rd Hero by Rebecca Anne Nguyen

The world has been decimated by climate change, but not all hope is lost. A secret time travel agency sends back a select group of “Heroes” to correct the course of history. Sloane Burrows longs to be a Hero, but her father would never allow it as he’s spent her life chastising her superpower memory. She tries to suppress her desire, but is constantly haunted by a mysterious dream and an unknown man who comes to her in her sleep. When she discovers that the man is real and he works for the agency and wants to recruit her, she must decide to leave her father’s approval behind and travel to the sixteenth century to spare the future from its fate. Using her memory, she’ll fight against all odds to save her time and return to Bastian.

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Praise for The 23rd Hero:

“The consistently high emotional intensity throughout Nguyen’s novel is the fuel that powers its narrative engine, as is the complex dynamism between the two lead characters.” — Kirkus Reviews

“The 23rd Hero is a thrilling, escapist ride through time, an old-fashioned romance, a modern parable about climate change, and, most importantly, the story of a woman finding her purpose. This is a delightful page-turner by an exciting new voice in fiction. Do yourself a favor and get lost in this story; you’ll return feeling a little more hopeful about everything.” — Mandy Berman, author of The Learning Curve and Perennials

“A love story that transcends time with a hero the reader will never forget. This compulsively-readable debut will transport you from a dystopian future to the idyll of 16th century France, all on the wings of a love story for the ages. Nguyen’s razor-sharp humor, gorgeous prose, and lush world building had me turning the pages late into the night. A writer to watch.” — Jessica Pearce Rotondi, author of What We Inherit: A Secret War and a Family’s Search for Answers

Get a first look at The 23rd Hero with this exclusive excerpt!

The 23rd Hero by Rebecca Anne Nguyen

Part 1

Sloane Burrows was cycling up traffic-clogged New Street, swerving around electric cars and self-driving trams as she followed the GPS inside her filtration mask. The sky was tinged a concerning shade of umber, the air tinny and sour through her mask, and the frequent rain showers in this part of town always carried the faint zest of nitrates. Still, she felt relieved to have gotten a gig on the south side of the harbor. Especially when she took a hard right and pedaled away from Stanley Park, turning her back to the depressing view of the Lions Gate bridge. She remembered how she used to look for the bridge through a screen of towering hemlocks, and how the hue of the sweeping green arch so closely matched the color of the trees that the city’s two most iconic fixtures seemed to become one; it was as if humanity was in perfect harmony with nature. Twenty years later, Sloane was no longer a child, and the bridge was no longer hidden. Painfully visible against the yellow-brown sky, it was the only thing in Vancouver that was still green.

When she reached Application Booth 439, Sloane hopped off her government-issued bicycle, inserted it into the nearest docking station, and pushed her way through the masked crowd, holding her Boothie badge above her head. Her boss, Brody, was always talking about the link between crowd control and confidence, but Sloane kept her eyes on the ground, overcome with the feeling of making her way down a gauntlet. If only she could fix the Program application booths without having to interact with the people who used them. The booths were quiet. The booths never complained. They’d always reminded Sloane of old-fashioned phone booths, except they were bright blue and just about everywhere—next to the self-checkout in vegan groceries, inside the terminals of high-speed train stations, and on pretty much every street corner throughout every inhabited area in the world. The Program had recently used a drone to deliver an application booth to a village in Far Western Nepal, which up until last week had been the last remaining area of human habitation without a booth within twenty kilometers. Some people thought it was overkill, all the booths, but Sloane thought it showed how committed the Program was to finding the planet’s next Hero no matter where they came from, whether they were a yogi living in a remote Himalayan cave or an environmental engineer from San Francisco. (Okay, so most Heroes were environmental engineers from San Francisco, or Copenhagen, or Tokyo. But the 2nd Hero had been an organic farmer from Wisconsin who prevented the discovery of DDT. And the 7th Hero was an auto mechanic from Ireland who convinced Henry Ford to invent an electric Model-T. So technically, the Program could choose anyone to be a Hero, as long as that person could effectively carry out their Mission once they traveled back in time.)

As Sloane moved through the crowd, most people rolled their identical bicycles to the side to let her pass, but a few told Sloane exactly how long they’d been waiting, and one guy reminded her that his tax dollars paid her salary.

“How long’s it gonna be?”

Sloane looked up to find the man at the front of the line frowning at her through his Full Face filtration mask. She resisted the urge to roll her eyes—those Full Face masks were three times the price of the government-issued masks, and the built-in VR wasn’t any better. The only difference was the Full Face mask was made of clear, recycled polycarbonate so other people could see your entire face instead of just your eyes. Not that this guy’s entire face was bad to look at, but still. If Sloane had that kind of money, she’d spend it on one of those $10,000 Bernese Mountain dogs. She couldn’t fit a mountain dog inside her studio apartment, but every time she saw one, it reminded her of her childhood timeline. There had been lots of dogs back then. Dogs and seagulls. Babies, even. But who was she kidding. If Sloane ever had extra money, she’d have to give it straight to her father, Harry; no matter how many times a Hero made the timeline change, the debt she owed Harry stayed the same.

“Last time this happened, the Boothie said he’d be done in three minutes,” said the man in the Full Face mask. “And when I rode past three hours later, he was still there.”

Sloane swallowed a sigh of exasperation and used her handheld to calculate how long the fix would take her. Usually, she was in and out of the booths in less than five minutes, completing the same rote tasks at every booth she serviced: run diagnostics on the software, empty the DNA samples from their respective compartments (blood and hair samples only—absolutely no semen!), secure the samples in her temperature-controlled cooler, and deliver the DNA to the nearest Program drop site. From there, drones would pick up the samples and deliver them to Basecamp, the Program’s headquarters, for processing. But this booth did not require routine maintenance. It appeared to have something wrong with its operating system, which might actually be an interesting problem to solve—the kind of problem Sloane could be solving every day at some sexy Hidden Valley tech company, if only she’d been born into one of those families where the parents actually wanted their children to succeed. Full Face was actually right—something complex like troubleshooting a buggy OS would take the average Boothie hours to complete. But the average Boothie did not remember every word of every book she’d ever read, including the thick tomes she’d consumed at-a-glance while earning her Bachelors in TechnoEngineering. The average Boothie couldn’t summon any moment from her training and play it back like a movie in her mind. The average Boothie couldn’t recall with perfect clarity every character she’d ever read in the programming language of every operating system she’d ever encountered, and the average Boothie couldn’t troubleshoot an error 98.3% faster than any of her peers.

“Give me seven minutes,” said Sloane, scanning her badge to open the door to the booth.

“Can you make it three?” asked Full Face.

Sloane turned to him, grateful the look on her face was hidden behind her mask. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“It’s just that I have to get across the Lions Gate before they close it,” he said.

“Who said they’re closing the bridge?”

Harry’s sixtieth birthday was tonight, and it was impossible to reach Sloane’s childhood home without crossing that bridge. If Harry would just move to the south side of the harbor, closer to Sloane and her twin brother, Simon, she could avoid the panic attacks that threatened every time she cycled over the bridge and reached the sixty-meter-high crest. She’d picture herself flying off the bridge into the churning, toxic waters of the Burrard Inlet, her body floating among the corpses of Chinook salmon, the City fishing her out with a giant net to be converted to zero-carbon fuel, a fate only slightly less distressing than missing her dad’s party. There was no avoiding it, though. If she wanted to reach Harry, there was always some sort of toll.

“The seawall’s closing, too,” said Full Face. “They’re forecasting a king tide.”

“The 17th Hero fixed that,” said Sloane. “There haven’t been king tides in the Burrard Inlet in over five years.”

“I thought the 19th Hero stopped the king tides.”

“Seventeenth,” she said. “The last king tide was during the storm surge that happened five years ago. It was Wednesday, March 16, at 4:57 PM.” Full Face’s eyes widened behind his mask. His look of surprise, along with the way her stomach just turned, were both warning signs that she had gone too far, said too much. “I just mean once a Hero fixes something, it stays fixed,” she said.

“They make Boothies memorize the outcomes of the Hero Missions?”

“Sure,” said Sloane. “I mean, no. No, not every outcome—”

“My cousin’s a Boothie, and he never had to memorize—”

“Hey, everyone?” said Sloane, clapping her hands. “Everyone! If you’re in a hurry, the booth two blocks down is fully functioning.”

The crowd began to disperse. Relieved, Sloane stepped inside the booth, slung her cooler onto the cushioned bench beneath the touchscreen, and rummaged for the half-eaten baguette she kept to quell her frequent nausea. Whenever she failed to hide what Harry liked to call her “freak memory,” (whenever someone noticed, and in noticing, felt obliged to make some comment, which was always some version of ‘Who the hell remembers something like that?’), the sickness would surge, only growing in intensity the more they probed, the closer they got to the truth: Boothies didn’t have to memorize anything except their username and password. It was Sloane who had everything memorized because Sloane remembered everything. Sloane remembered the precise moment of the last king tide the same way she remembered every moment of her entire life—in crystalline detail, from where she’d been and what she’d been doing to what she’d been thinking and remembering at the time, her mind like a funhouse mirror, memories within memories without end. If she focused hard, she could keep the memories contained in the back of her mind. But if she was especially tired or got a little too drunk, every past reality could converge on the present moment like too many holograms projected onto the same spot—a dizzying phenomenon for which sleep was the only respite. Her memory made her sick. Her memory made her avoid application booths she had serviced in the past because the memories of past fixes would distract her from the present problem, muddying her focus. Her memory made her feel different from everyone around her, as if she were an alien. Or a robot. Or someone with a disease so rare, she’d never met anyone else who had it. It was better for everyone, but especially for Sloane’s stomach, if she ignored her freak memory as best she could and pretended it didn’t exist.

She heard a thwack, and she flinched. Full Face’s hand was splayed against the booth wall to block the door from closing. Sloane lifted the front of her filtration mask and stuffed the baguette into her mouth before he could say something else about her memory and send the contents of her stomach spilling onto her sneakers; she knew from experience that vomiting in an application booth was the most humiliating place a person could vomit, except maybe an airplane. But hardly anyone was flying on those anymore.

Full Face hesitated, watching Sloane chew. Something about her face seemed to surprise him, as if he’d only seen her eyes through her mask and was now stunned to learn she had a nose and mouth, too. “I can’t go to the booth down the street,” said Full Face. “By the time I cycle two blocks, wait for the trams to stop, cross the street, and wait in the lineup, the bridge will be closed. Plus you’ll be long gone, and I’ll have no way of getting your number.”

“My Boothie number?”

“Your personal number.”

Sloane swallowed the bread, her cheeks darkening. “Seven minutes,” she said, scanning her badge to force the door shut. “Watch your hand.”

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