Chloe Benjamin
Tinder Press (UK); G.P. Putnam’s Sons (US)
One of the big books of 2026, Under Story by Chloe Benjamin, has a wonderful premise. What if there were an identical universe to ours, except that time runs in the opposite direction? And what if we could cross over from this universe to the “anti-universe” and then back again?
This is a human, warm and extremely ambitious book. Our hero, fungi expert Laurel Salter, having suffered a devastating loss, takes a job as a kitchen steward at an Antarctic research station. She makes friends with other workers and becomes fascinated with a strange light display in the distance called the “anomaly”. We gradually come to realise that this light display could potentially be a crossing place to the anti-universe.
Everything ramps up when Laurel’s ex-husband, a physicist named Eli Rosen, shows up to investigate the anomaly. Laurel wasn’t expecting him; they are barely on speaking terms.
Alert: a few mild spoilers ahead, but only because I need to explain what was (for me) a problem.
Laurel’s story, and the way we go back and forth from the present-day Antarctic to her past and the heartbreak that happened, is all well done in the first half of the book. Arguably, it could have been edited – this is a long book – but if you don’t mind a languorous pace, and a lot of focus on side plots and side characters, then no biggie.
There’s a lot of science – about physics, Eli’s speciality, and also about fungi, Laurel’s speciality – arguably too much. Either way, all the science served to set me up for a book that was going to feel scientifically robust… which brings us to the nub of my problem.
Of course, in a novel, universes can have time running backwards for some things but not others
Eli and Laurel cross over to the anti-universe, for heartfelt reasons I won’t go into. There, they duly find that time runs backwards. Politics, wars and so on happen in the reverse order to those in the regular universe. For example, Donald Trump is president before Barack Obama. People are born in their graves, very old, and get physically more robust throughout their lives before, near the end, shrinking into tiny people, then being pushed back into their mother’s wombs. So far, so backwards. Interesting, too. Babies slipping back into their mothers! Newborns being very old people, waking from death!
However. Some things in this universe go backwards, but a heck of a lot goes forwards. Characters drive to places in a regular way as they de-age. They eat food and digest it after eating, not vice versa. They have sex in a normal manner (in a pivotal sex scene, the man ejaculates at the end of the sex, not at the start). They go on holiday at the start of a trip, enjoy it, then go home. Conversations begin, take place and end, with questions answered and so forth – all very much in the order you would expect in a regular universe.
Of course, in a novel, universes can have time running backwards for certain things but not others; authors may do exactly as they please. But for whatever reason, I ended up worrying over the physics, and that ruined things. (I look forward to hearing what physicists think of this book.)
Anyway, once you start worrying that the central logic of a book doesn’t really hang together, it does tend to dampen enjoyment. Nonetheless, I still read to the end, and I enjoyed a lot of my journey forwards in our universe, and (partly) backwards in the anti-universe, and there is a lot of beauty in the story Benjamin weaves. She is clearly very talented.
Emily also recommends…
Scott Alexander Howard
Atlantic Books
This is a good example of a book where the central premise may make literally no sense – the valleys on
either side of a central valley are either ahead of it in time, or behind it – but it doesn’t matter one whit because the writer never bothers to explain what’s going on, but instead pulls you along so firmly that physics is the last thing you’re worrying about.
Emily H. Wilson is the author of the Sumerians series (Inanna, Gilgamesh and Ninshubar, all published by Titan) and she is currently working on her first sci-fi novel. She is a former editor of 91av and you can follow her on Instagram @emilyhwilson1
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