An unexpected gem
One of my very favorite books, read in a single night at Christmas. It's that sort of book - small enough to read all at once, but broken into little vignettes one could treasure night after night. Each vignette, loosely bound together with a wraparound plot featuring Albert Einstein, depicts a different reality from our own, where time functions differently. In one, time runs backward; in another, time is a literal location you can walk toward or away from. Another reality holds people without long-term memory, and everyone's past is written down in books. How similar or alien these worlds are to our own lie mostly in the mind of the reader...and that's half the beauty of it. The prose is simple and tight, but the ideas are absolutely breathtaking. If you want a nice quiet read on a summer's day, or a near-Christmas night, I couldn't recommend this enough.