An NPR, GQ, and Buzzfeed Best Book of the Year One of The Washington Post’s best science fiction and fantasy books of the year The acclaimed author of The Dream of Perpetual Motion returns with a compelling novel about the effects of science and technology on our friendships, our love lives, and our sense of self. Rebecca Wright has reclaimed her life, finding her way out of her grief and depression following a personal tragedy years ago. She spends her days working in customer support for the internet dating site where she first met her husband. But she has a strange, persistent sense that everything around her is somewhat off-kilter: she constantly feels as if she has walked into a room and forgotten what she intended to do there; on TV, the President seems to be the wrong person in the wrong place; her dreams are full of disquiet. Meanwhile, her husband's decade-long dedication to his invention, the causality violation device (which he would greatly prefer you not call a “time machine”) has effectively stalled his career and made him a laughingstock in the physics community. But he may be closer to success than either of them knows or can possibly imagine. Version Control is about a possible near future, but it’s also about the way we live now. It’s about smart phones and self-driving cars and what we believe about the people we meet on the Internet. It’s about a couple, Rebecca and Philip, who have experienced a tragedy, and about how they help—and fail to help—each other through it. Emotionally powerful and stunningly visionary, Version Control will alter the way you see your future and your present.
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“Narrator January LaVoy transitions smoothly between character voices in this audiobook about the development of a ‘causality violation’ device…LaVoy’s character portrayals feature nuances in their attitudes and interactions that shift with the flow of events. She maintains the story’s narrative drive and sustains her tone of engagement throughout the exposition. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award.”
— AudioFile
“A gripping page-turner, an insightful and wise look into the lives of scientists, a moving time-distortion story, and a clever satire about our current information age. I enjoyed the heck out of it.”
— Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times bestselling author“With time travel as a fascinating backdrop, Palmer delicately examines the layers of stories we create when trying to differentiate ‘the information from the truth.’”
— Washington Post“A knowing, frequently funny and often very sad novel that explores love, marriage, and loss in the age of social media and perpetual online metrics.”
— San Francisco Chronicle“A vertigo-inducing peek behind the veil of existence…It’s exhilarating. It’s exhausting. And the ending is a virtuoso performance that yanks the brain as it disorients the heart.”
— NPR.org“A novel brimming with ideas, ambition, imagination, and possibility yet one in which the characters remain richly engaging for the reader.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)Be the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Dexter Palmer holds a PhD in English literature from Princeton University, where he completed his dissertation on the work of James Joyce, William Gaddis, and Thomas Pynchon. His first novel, The Dream of Perpetual Motion, was selected as one of the best fiction debuts of 2010 by Kirkus Reviews.
January LaVoy, winner of numerous awards for narration, was named a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine in 2019. She is an American actress best known for her character Noelle Ortiz on the ABC daytime drama One Life to Live. In addition to working extensively in narration and television, including roles on Law & Order and All My Children, she has worked on and off Broadway as well as in regional theater.