Salvage and Demolition
*Starred Review* It might be small, but Powers’ novella packs a wallop. Rare-book dealer Richard Blanzac receives a box of items on consignment, among which is a verse manuscript written, apparently, by one Sophie Greenwald. Before he’s quite figured out what the manuscript is, he gets a call from a stranger, an elderly woman, who begs him to destroy it. And, soon after that, he encounters a man claiming to be a scholar who seems quite intent on getting his hands on the manuscript. Baffling as those two incidents are, they pale by comparison to the next thing that happens: Blanzac is transported 55 years back in time, where he meets the author of the manuscript, who tells him that she has already encountered him earlier that same day (although that meeting lies, apparently, in Richard’s own future) and that the manuscript, if it lands in the wrong hands, could have terrible, world-altering consequences. Evoking such genre notables as Richard Matheson’s Bid Time Return, Jack Finney’s Time and Again, and Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife (along with such films as Source Code and The Terminator), the book is a sort of literary Möbius strip, looping around on itself, finding its ending in its beginning. Powers is an acclaimed SF and fantasy author—The Anubis Gates (1983) is considered a time-travel classic—and this new title has the feel of a cult favorite, the kind of small-press jewel that will develop a devoted following. --David Pitt