The Lost Time Accidents

This new work from the author of Lowboy is an outrageous, playful, and wildly ambitious novel about the nature of time and love. The action spans the globe over 100 years as it follows multiple generations of an eccentric, brilliant, and perhaps unhinged family. The novel begins in Moravia in the early 1900s with what may be an important scientific breakthrough about the way time works by the family's patriarch, Ottokar Gottfriedens Toula. He's a pickle maker by trade and an amateur physicist who discovers that current time exists synchronistically and fluidly with every other lived moment—and thus can be traversed. Ottokar's untimely demise in the streets of Znojmo, Moravia, soon after he documents his theory leaves much that is tantalizingly unexplained, and this mystery becomes a kind of curse for the family as successive generations grow obsessed with what it may or may not reveal about their own lives and their dark family past. Wray handles this all masterfully, blending sf, quantum physics, traditional realism, magic realism, and even a love story skillfully and poignantly.