Retro

Ash is broke, unemployed, and tired of watching everyone else's life look better than hers on Instagram. Then an ad for Retro, a luxury time travel company, turns up in her feed with a caption she can't ignore: they're hiring. Time travel for vacationers is already a thing, just not one she could ever afford. Working for it is another matter. As a Time Travel Agent, Ash escorts wealthy clients to the most photogenic corners of American history. One trip is a bachelorette party chasing cowboy-romance fantasies in the Old West. Another is a birthday group ready to celebrate "'20s for your twenties" in the speakeasies. She also stands politely by as Wall Street men try their luck during the Gold Rush. It's thrilling, ridiculous, and more than a little surreal, and the past is only a Retro Metro ride away. Ash is a cynic by habit, but she gets pulled in anyway. She never became the actress she once planned to be, yet this job feels like something better, as if her own life had turned into a movie. It even comes with a love triangle: she can't decide between a mysterious crush at the office and a handsome private eye who is courting her in 1937. For the first time in years her life looks enviable, so she would rather not notice the odd things happening to her memory and her relationships back in the present. But the more she travels, the more her real life starts to come apart, and she has to face the possibility that running off to the past was never an escape at all. This is a debut novel, and it was longlisted for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize.