Secondhand Daylight by Eugen Bacon and Andrew Hook

(John Hunt Publishing, 2023)

Reviewed by Steven French

This is not your usual time travel love story! It begins with Green, a ‘Pommy’ slacker, living in Melbourne in 1990 who goes to a bar, meets a woman—his ‘possible girl’—has a dance with her and then…finds himself flat on his backside outside, with no idea what just happened. At first, he thinks he’s ‘losing’ time, maybe through drink, or drugs or psychosis but the doctors assure him there’s nothing wrong. Then he starts missing appointments with the company-referred psychologist, as well as days at work, and his best mate’s weekend barbecue and other life-altering events until gradually Green comes to realise that he’s skipping forwards through time, whilst aging as normal. With each ‘time-slip’ becoming longer in duration, he faces the frightening prospect of losing not just friends and family and all the familiar landmarks of his life, but perhaps even passing beyond humanity itself. And so, this half of the book ends with Green in the care of the AI-led foundation that he funded, being told that someone called Zada has jumped back through his timeline, using the ‘Tesseract’, a McGuffin of a time-machine that she helped to develop, in an attempt to discover the reason for his time-slips and stop him vanishing into the future.

The second half then begins with Zada herself, a bi-sexual tech prodigy who goes from yoga sex with a casual pick-up to an interview with Green’s AI, which hires her to be the head of the foundation’s time-travel project. Emotional and psychological profiling form part of the process and Zada comes to realise that she has been chosen not just for her engineering skills but also for her willingness to take a one-way trip into the past. With the Tesseract acting as a nifty all-purpose payment device as well as ‘a four-dimensional wormhole in a cube inside a clutch purse’, Zada hops from each known milestone of Green’s life to the previous one, trying to catch hold of him before he jumps forward again.

Like all good time-travel stories, this one ties itself together in a satisfying way with the final chapters of each half of the book taking us to the same place, same time but viewed from the two different perspectives. Weaving throughout these different personal stories are reflections on relationships, not just with family and friends but also with particular locations and, of course, times, with the reader given a strong sense of the shape of Melbourne, past, present and future, even down to its tramlines and local hotels (including the Sarah Sands, where much of the action takes place and which is an actual, well-known landmark). And what the book is really about, I think, are the difficulties involved in making a real connection when the world around you is changing so fast and you’re struggling to keep a grip on what’s solid and familiar.

So, this is a time-travel story with emotional heft and although in places the writing spells out what really doesn’t need to be made so explicit, in others it is nuanced and thoughtful and quite beautiful. Green’s growing sense of dislocation is adroitly handled, as is Zada’s increasing desperation as she misses him time and again. For anyone who has felt an opportunity slip away or who has wondered about possibilities lost, which must surely include most folk, this is a book that will resonate.

Review from BSFA Review 20 - Download your copy here.