Every Anxious Wave: A Novel

Description

EVERY ANXIOUS WAVE tells the story of good guy Karl Bender, a thirty-something bar owner whose life lacks love and meaning. When he stumbles upon a time-traveling wormhole, Karl, along with best friend Wayne, develops a business selling access to people who want to travel back in time to hear their favorite bands. It's a pretty ingenious plan, until Karl, intending to send Wayne back to 1980, transports him to 980 Mannahatta instead. Karl is distraught. He needs an ally. And he finds one in prickly, overweight astrophysicist, Lena Geduldig. Karl and Lena's connection is immediate. While they work on getting Wayne back, they fall in love-with time travel, and each other. Unable to resist meddling with the past, Karl and Lena bounce around time. That's when they alter the course of their lives. That's when they threaten their future together. A high spirited and engaging novel, EVERY ANXIOUS WAVE plays ball with the big questions: Who would we become if we could rewrite our pasts? How do we hold on to love across time?

MO DAVIAU was born in Fresno, California and proclaimed her life goal of publishing a novel at the age of eight. A former librarian and independent bookseller, Mo is also a solo performer, having performed at storytelling shows such as Bedpost Confessions and The Soundtrack Series. She is a graduate of Smith College and the Helen Zell Writers' Program at the University of Michigan where Every Anxious Wave won a Hopwood Award. Mo lives in Portland, Oregon. This is her first novel.

"Every Anxious Wave gives us the intelligent irreverence of Nick Hornby, the honest romance of Gary Shteyngart, and the swoon-worthy charm of a John Cusack movie, all within a riveting story of lost love, bent time, and rock stars. A delightful, innovative debut." --Rebecca Dinerstein, author of The Sunlit Night "A bittersweet, century-hopping odyssey of love, laced with weird science, music geekery, and heart-wrenching laughs...the deeper it goes into Karl's and Lena's erratic trajectories -- past, present, and future -- the more it rings with a uniqueness that transcends the tropes of time travel and indie romance...a wise, witty, whipcrack sci-fi romp about how our passions can both lift us up and hold us back." --NPR ..".a total punk rock time travel novel ... Like Vonnegut's best work, the book is whimsical and has a beating heart ... This is, at root, a novel about how we find things we weren't looking for, and that our best efforts to fix things often mess them up even more, but that it somehow turns out okay anyway." --Mashable "An absolute kick in the pants to read--if you love rock, bodies, and time travel, this is your ride." --Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Small Backs of Children "In this stunning debut, Daviau lays bare all the ways in which dreams and regret are both fueled by love. As much fun as a Melvin's concert, Every Anxious Wave is a romp." --Monica Drake, author of Clown Girl "A punk-rock time-travel love story for the ages . . . Daviau is ferocious with her sad and flawed characters, whose pain propels the story through several iterations. Because the tale keeps changing with every visit to the future, the book doesn't end the way even its characters expect it to but is satisfying nonetheless. A dark and funny love story that, like its main characters, is much sweeter than it appears on the surface." --Kirkus "What begins as comic turns much darker...in this melancholy, yet improbably hopeful novel." --Booklist "Hopwood Award-winning author Daviau writes with humor and compassion, creating absorbing, sympathetic characters and enveloping serious questions about love and life-changing events in a balloon of mind-bending time travels. Readers of all types of fiction will enjoy." --Library Journal "Think Back to the Future as imagined by, well, a former college radio DJ ... Every Anxious Wave is for all those no-longer-kids who got good grades just like [Daviau], who throw on Beat Happening and think a little too much about how great the 1990s were." --Mystatesman.com "A total punk rock time travel novel ... Like Vonnegut's best work, the book is whimsical and has a beating heart." --Mashable