THE POSSIBILITIES

A mother whose infant son goes missing must cross over into other versions of her life in an attempt to find her baby.

Hannah Bennett is a successful novelist with a proclivity for scary stories; her career has netted her a big house in the Berkeley Hills and a levelheaded husband, Adam. Since a traumatic experience eight months ago when her son, Jack, was born, unbreathing, via emergency C-section, Hannah can’t shake what she and her therapist called the “car-swerve” feeling: an overwhelming anxiety, as in a near miss while driving, that something that could have ended in tragedy was narrowly avoided. Indeed, this pervasive anxiety is so severe that Hannah can no longer conjure scary stories on the page—what greater fear is there than being a new mother?—and overwhelmed Adam is ready to pull the plug on their marriage. But soon Hannah’s fears take on a terrifying, concrete reality: She begins experiencing moments when she seems to inhabit a version of her life where Jack died at birth. One evening, after a day full of these alternate-life visions, Hannah and Adam find Jack vanished from his crib. As she desperately searches for Jack, Hannah realizes that it is precisely these moments of crossing into a parallel reality—she calls it “riding the possibilities”—that may hold the key not only to finding Jack, but to making sense of her own dark past. This novel bears many tropes of quantum-mechanics narratives—collisions of multiple versions of the self, characters puzzling over subatomic particles and “the many worlds”—but the story’s inventiveness lies in the way it finds an SF narrative analog for the disorientation of postpartum psychology. The author, a psychotherapist herself, has orchestrated quite a mashup of genres, to page-turning effect.

Part thriller, part psychology, part quantum physics—all fun.