The kingdoms

Joe Tournier's life is a muddled mess at the beginning of Pulley's latest (after The Lost Future of Pepperharrow, 2020), and his confusion continues throughout the story. As he steps off the train at London's (yes, London's) Gare du Roi station, he has no clue where he lives or who his family is. With a diagnosis of an epileptic seizure and a master claiming ownership, Joe returns to an unfamiliar wife and life. Before he finishes his enslaved years, he receives a postcard that waited 93 years for delivery. Later, he leaves his wife and daughter for a three-month assignment to repair the lighthouse pictured on the mysterious postcard. He finds himself thrust back in time and abducted by the remnants of the English navy, who are desperately fighting off the French in a revised version of history. As he shifts between time lines, Joe becomes aware of some of the ripple effects of history changing around him and must determine when he belongs. This riveting story keeps the reader hoping that Joe can rebuild his family in the best time line.

Pulley's latest genre-bending feat (after The Lost Future of Pepperharrow) masterfully combines history, speculative fiction, queer romance, and more into an unputdownable whole. In 1898, Joe Tournier finds himself in Londres­­--a city in the French Republic, which colonized England in the Napoleonic Wars--without any memory of his life before that moment. All he has are hazy images that come to him in dreams and an unshakable sense that something is wrong. And he's not the only one: others in the city are feeling the same strange amnesia. When a postcard arrives for Joe bearing clues to his identity--mailed in 1805 but somehow depicting a recently built Scottish lighthouse--Joe resolves to find a way to reach that lighthouse and search for answers--but the mystery only grows more complicated from there, leading Joe down a rabbit hole that sends him from Scotland to Spain on a time-bending journey that spans more than a century. Pulley doesn't shy away from the story's sharp edges, exploring the devastating effects changes in the past can have on the future and shining a light on the ambiguous moral choices made by characters under duress. These dark, challenging moments are bolstered by the action-packed and intricate plot and leavened by the rich emotional entanglements of the makeshift family that Joe stumbles into along the way. This is a stunner. Agent: Jenny Savill, Andrew Nurnberg Assoc. (May)

Napoleon conquered England in this time-travel/alt-history fantasy set at the turns of the 19th and 20th centuries. When Joe Tournier steps off a train from Glasgow in Londres in 1898, he can remember his name but very little else. He's suffering from "silent epilepsy," a doctor tells him, which is characterized not by the usual convulsions but by symptoms associated with epileptic auras: amnesia, paramnesia, visions. Paramnesia is "the blurring of something imaginary and something real," explains the doctor, giving what might work equally well as a definition of fiction, particularly of Pulley's favored fantasy genre. In the time-travel subgenre, of course, there are better explanations than epilepsy for déjà vu ("the sense you've seen something new before") and its opposite, jamais vu ("when something that should be familiar feels wholly alien"). Joe's master retrieves him from the hospital--like most people of English descent under the reign of Napoleon IV, Joe is enslaved--and takes him home to Joe's wife, who is not the same woman as Madeline, the wife Joe believes he remembers. A postcard delivered almost a century after it's mailed sends Joe north to the Outer Hebrides on a quest to learn about his forgotten past and perhaps find Madeline. There, he passes through a time portal into the middle of the Napoleonic War at a point when victory hangs in the balance--and when previous temporal crossings have already made that balance wobble and spin. Missouri Kite, an officer in the Royal Navy, and his sister and ship's surgeon, Agatha Castlereagh, hope to use information and technology from the future to win the war for the British. Is it too late to change history? Can Joe help Kite and Agatha without changing the future so much that he endangers the toddler daughter he left behind in 1900--or indeed, his own existence? As scenes spiral back and forth between centuries, the book's emotional center crystallizes around a fundamental mystery: Who, in fact, is Joe? All time-travel plots are fraught with paradox, but not all rise to Pulley's level of tricky cleverness, and few of those trickily clever books rise to her level of emotional intensity. Suspenseful, philosophical, and inventive, this sparkling novel explores the power of memory and love. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.