Entanglement

Book Author Bryan Walpert
Rights Available World excl. NZ

A memory-impaired time traveller attempts to correct a tragic mistake he made in 1976 when, panicked, he abandoned his brother on a frozen lake in Baltimore to a beating that disabled him. Decades later, in 2011, a novelist researching at the Centre for Time in Sydney becomes romantically involved with a philosopher from New Zealand. A writer at a lake retreat in New Zealand in 2019 obsesses over the disintegration of his marriage following another tragedy. Are they separate stories, or are they one? Is the time traveller actually travelling? Can the past be changed? As the answers to these questions slowly emerge, the lives become entangled in a tale of love, desperation and physics.

The three stories travel side-by-side through the novel, not apparently linked but riffing off each other. The love story in Sydney plays out backwards via journal entries that includes a writer’s research into time travel; the time traveller story is a frantic against-the-clock tale in a Baltimore winter; and the writer’s story is told through a series of responses to writing prompts that dig into a failing marriage, the loss of a child, and living with a disabled brother.

An erudite and literary novel written with a poet’s eye and using fragmented stories that sprawl across time and countries, Entanglement feels like the work of Canadian author Anne Michaels. It nods to speculative fiction but asks the reader to decide if the time travel is real or imagined. The ending is hopeful and potentially redemptive.

Awards
Shortlisted for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction 2022

About the Author
Bryan Walpert is the author of Late Sonata, winner of the 2020 Seizure Viva La Novella Prize, as well as a short story collection, four books of poetry and two of literary criticism. Originally from Baltimore in the US, he is a professor in creative writing at Massey University, Auckland.