Secondhand Daylight: A Novel

by Eugen Bacon, Andrew Hook

Foreword INDIES - 2023 Finalist Science Fiction

Something is happening to Green. He is an ordinary guy, time-jumping forward at a startling, uncontainable rate. He is grappling to understand his present; his relationship is wholly tattered; his ultimate destination is a colossal question mark. Zada is a scientist in the future. She is mindful of Green's conundrum and seeks to unravel it by going backwards in time. Can she stop him from jumping to infinity? Their point of intersection is fleeting but memorable, each one's travel impacting the other's past or future. And one of them doesn't even know it yet. Secondhand Daylight is a reverse story in alternate timelines between two protagonists whose lives must one day intersect. A titillating offering from World Fantasy Award-finalist Eugen Bacon, an Otherwise Fellowships honouree for ‘doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction'. In collaboration with three-time British Fantasy Society Award-winner Andrew Hook.

Genres: Science Fiction, Time Travel

229 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 27, 2023

Reviews

[Paul Taylor · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF. Odd, choppy prose and dialogue were off-putting and hard to follow. Drove me crazy. Maybe I'm not hip enough to get it.

[Julia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found the premise of the book intriguing, but struggled with the writing style. The dialogue sounded strange and clunky. And, just like the very two dimensional protagonist himself jumps ahead in time, his thoughts seemed to jump around a lot; I often went back a few lines to find what I might have missed and couldn't.

[gee ☽ (IG: momoxshi) · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF at 25%

Secondhand Daylight is about a man who finds himself jumping ahead in time every now and then without realizing it.

It’s an interesting story concept, but I really couldn’t follow it because of its writing. Just like the protagonist, it jumps ahead at thoughts so quickly you don’t realize he was talking about a new topic that may or may not be related to the previous scene. The first time travel scene was confusing at best. There’s also a shift in writing style that changes often enough that you know there are two distinct authors. The protagonist is both casual and crass and eloquent and poetic but at distinctly different times. I also found that the people around him aren’t reacting like how normal humans react to things. Specifically, his supervisor and former close friend was more concerned on wasted barbecue than on his friend and employee who was technically missing for a week. I could chalk it up as a weird situation of them thinking that the protagonist was a drug user (still a bit weak, they should still be concerned about the person!). But then when he shows up to his dad’s wedding 6 months after the event—already that should be a huge warning sign to the dad, even if they’re estranged—it was merely shrugged off.

Overall, it has great potential but the writing is all over the place.

[Vanette Cordova · Rating 1 out of 5]

Great concept, not so great execution. The writing jumped around without any real detail. The main character was easy to dislike and the depth of the other characters was absent. At one point a side character dies and it doesn't affect the reader or the story. The intrigue of the ending is the only thing that kept me reading, and it was sadly predictable. Not my cup of tea.

I would like to thank NetGalley for the opportunity to read this early.

[Terry Grimwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve always had a soft spot for time travel stories because they have so much potential for human drama, the what ifs, the paradoxes, the second chances. The trope is essentially divided into two, on the one hand you have the hard science time travel stories such as The Time Machine by H. G. Wells, Up The Line by Robert Silverberg and The Tomorrow War movie, and on the other, the human drama of The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger and Time and Again by Jack Finney, to name only two. Secondhand Daylight by Eugen Bacon and Andrew Hook falls between these two camps, but veers towards the latter.

John Green has no choice. He is a man catapulted forwards in time for no apparent reason, via seemingly random, involuntary jumps. He is quickly disorientated and increasingly alone as his existing familial and social relationships are extinguished, and new ones are made impossible to form. At the same time (pardon the pun), Zada is charged with the task of travelling back along the temporal highway from the future, our future, to locate John Green. She finds herself, at once, hunting for a needle in a timestack (apologies to Robert Silverberg), and trying to negotiate the confusing intensity of a world in the border country between centuries.

Secondhand Daylight is a joy. It hurtles along at a cracking pace, is relentlessly inventive and always emotionally engaging. Both Green and Zada are spiky, flawed but eminently likeable characters and the reader is quickly drawn to them and their individual plights. The characters, even the bit players, are well-drawn, multi-layered and vivid. There is no major global drama. The world is not in need of saving. Secondhand Daylight is just a damn fine story well told. It possesses a flawless inner logic and a touching human drama. Touching, that is, but never schmaltzy.

[Phil Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quantum Leap meets Memento in this clever exploration of time travel. The plot loops enticingly around an exploration of the personal impact of skipping erratically through time.

This clever book features an unusual time travel element, along with strong characters and a thought-provoking premise. I really enjoyed reading Secondhand Daylight.

[Racheal Chitondwe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Second Hand Daylight is a speculative fiction novel by Eugen Bacon and Andrew Hook starring two characters, Green and Zada, whose lives seem to be worlds apart yet so near. The story starts out with Green, a 27year-old male with a troubled childhood. His life changes one night at one of his favourite hangout spots. For someone with zero ambition like Green and a zeal for life, he has what one would call a future.

‘’My life flashed before my eyes’’ would be an understatement for Green who at a sudden flash of light on the dance floor had a near death experience that started pushing him into the future. After that weird night of meeting his ‘’possible girl’’ his life ceased to be normal. He starts time jumping unknowingly. He would wake up tomorrow and it would already be next week, next month, two or three years into the future.

Time travel is supposed to be fun, or at least an adventure, but for Green it was torture as he failed to maintain relationships with his family and best friend. This led him to lose his job and shelter, his childhood home. The only silver -lining in this is he some-how got compensated for it and had the money from that settlement double and found himself a millionaire. His way off into the future and starts ‘’Social Boxing’’ about his predicament hoping to find some sort of help in an attempt to grab the sheets of time. There is a little glimmer of hope when someone actually genuinely responds.

Before that happens his pushed into the future where he is a business mogul and owns a team who specialise in investigating his time jumps. He is told that the team sent a young woman named Zada to find Green and stabilise his time jumps. Future Green wonders how and why someone would risk going into the past to save his past self, leaving all they know behind without the possibility of getting back.

Zada, the opposite of Green, a woman full of zeal and ambition seemingly ahead of her time and bored leaves in search of Green from the past. She fails at first in her attempts but still meets the people who cared about Green, who lived as though he was dead when he was still alive due to not knowing what was going on in their friends and sons life. Just as she is about to give up searching for Green, she visits the one place she thought she would find him, and then it happens, the opening scene is the end. She finds out it was her all along, she was the one who had de-stabilised Green’s time jumps, and it was happening in a loop, she in that moment before she loses him decides to make things right and re-sets the Tessaract.

I enjoyed reading this time travel story. It has a modern touch, punchy, edgy, adventurous, and zesty. The two authors gave us a fresh approach by bringing the two stories together. We are always told that in order to have a future we must look into the past. For answers etc and Zada in this sense, found her future in the past and almost completely felt wholesome.

The story kept me lingering and wanting more. Though I have never time travelled I found the story relatable. We may not time jump but we do travel in our thoughts and dreams, we even go through events that seem familiar to us. The mystery is always in the questions, ‘’Have I been here?’’, ‘’Why do I feel like I have done this before?’’, ‘’Why do I feel like I know this person?’’ We all at one point feel like we are drifting through life like Green, watching it pass by and live around people like Zada who just cruise through it. We all compare the progress of other people’s lives to ours, as if they are in some kind of time jump and we are stagnant and out of touch with them. I learned that in life we must learn to check up on our loved one’s and not take them for granted. It took Green a few time jumps to realise the importance of relationships.

I found no negative aspects in this book and in the way this story was told, my only complaint is that it ended. This book was well-edited and made for smooth reading, I recommend this book to an adult audience as it contains certain scenes of an adult nature. I give it a rating of 5 out of 5 stars.

[Amy (Bossy Bookworm) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although the first section felt manic and uneven as Green hurtled through time, the second point of view offered lovely perspective on human connections and duty to each other.

Green is just an ordinary young guy, dancing, drinking, living it up. But something's off: he's started hurtling through time, and he can't stop, which means he can't hold onto relationships or grasp his present before he's off again.

Zada is a scientist from the future who becomes aware of Green's problem and seeks to help him. But doing so may require her to jump into Green's timeline, and she knows that there's no assurance she'll ever get back to her own original time again.

A meeting of the two characters could alter their lives forever.

I had significant difficulty getting through the initial portion of this book. Green's party-guy, train-of-thought-spewing, reactive personality made it tough for me to follow what he was trying to express and tough to care about him as a character. The early scenes felt zany and disjointed, even without the time travel element. I was very close to abandoning the book.

But I'm glad I stuck with it. The calm and thoughtful perspective offered by Zada's later point of view made for a far more cohesive story--and that's saying something, as the novel is, after all, a time-jumping frenzy in a futuristic setting.

It's unclear whether the book's having been written by two authors accounts for some of this drastic split.

Alternative perspectives later in the book (family, friends, and Zada) served up a surprisingly vulnerable, sympathetic Green that was not evident to me in the early portion of the book.

The story centers around Green's activities, but because of the shift in point of view away from his own, he largely drops out of the plot and the story takes off without him. The off-screen, forward-thinking future version of Green didn't jibe with the early image of him for me, but his unexpected, spot-on predictions and savvy intuition allow for the resources for the most interesting portion of the story to occur in the future, as a crack team attempts to understand how to send Zada back to meet him in time.

I received a prepublication edition of this title courtesy of NetGalley and John Hunt Publishing: Cosmic Egg Books.

To see my full review on The Bossy Bookworm, or to find out about Bossy reviews and Greedy Reading Lists as soon as they're posted, please see Secondhand Daylight.

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[Tim Hicks · Rating 3 out of 5]

They almost lost me around the middle, when Green had jumped several times and never once thought about making arrangements to take care of things if he jumps. And he's a nebbish, apparently neither smart nor ambitious. But I wanted to followup on the hint about Not Em.

So I skim ahead. Suddenly Green is a tycoon and a genius; the former explained, the latter not.
Now here's Zada; I'd better read about her. OK, this is getting more interesting. And sure enough, the arc of the plot comes around, to a quite acceptable explanation of events (although you have to stretch "acceptable" in ANY time travel story.

Having read a LOT of time travel stories, I can now accept that you can answer "How?" with "I have a Tesseract" instead of rambling on about the chronosynclastic infundibulum or the block concept of time or "you see, it's like sailing on a river." All the latter ones are the same bullshit in more words.

Only "it's magic" would be same but shorter.

On the whole, quite acceptable, and just enough different to stand out from the pack.

[Ailie Vuper · Rating 3 out of 5]

The premise of this book, two people time traveling in opposite directions and trying to cross paths is fantastic. The future world that Bacon and Hook imagine is very intriguing. I think the characters are mostly well developed but I ultimately didn't feel that connected to Green or Zada. I think where this book lost me was the fact that it was stream of consciousness so it was at times very difficult to follow what was happening. While I think that was a really interesting choice for a science fiction novel, it definitely caught me off guard and took me a while to get into the flow of the story. This particular novel might not have been one of my tops but I am very interested in reading more from both authors because I think they have a lot of great ideas that push the boundary of science fiction writing.

Thank you to NetGalley and John Hunt Publishing for the opportunity to read and review this ARC!

[Gene Rowe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am a Neanderthal when it comes to scifi, rooted in the classic era, in space opera. When Secondhand Daylight fell into my lap, my brow probably crinkled. What was this thing? Short. Punchy. Lyrical. Sensuous. At times, inscrutable. The story of two people, one travelling forward in time, the other travelling back, their stories entwined, and as confusing as any time paradox would, should be. It starts in a nightclub in Melbourne and… skips and jumps from there, on and up and out. I shouldn’t like it. I’m a Neanderthal, remember? I grunt and swing clubs: big, bold, brash… but nuanced? And yet… I did like it. In fact, I enjoyed it very much. So different, so… intriguing. I’m a man of ale presented with a complex, mellow glass of red. Whoa! Another glass, please! Sometimes it’s worth stepping from your comfort zone, of trying something new. I did. And you should too.

[Jana · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting take on time travel. The main character John Green is being thrown randomly and involuntarily forward in time which obviously messes with his life and social relationships on top of being very disorienting and confusing.
Then we have Zara who is traveling back in time from the future to find John Green.
The characters are very likable and it is enjoyable to follow along with them.
The book itself was at times hard to follow and the plot a little harder to get into as it tended to be confusing for the reader as much as the main character.
Overall it was an interesting premise and thought provoking but maybe not for someone that likes more plot driven, exciting type of fiction.
#SecondhandDaylight #NetGalley

[Alistair Conwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a clever, touching and, at times, funny story about two engaging time travellers - but one is travelling into the future and the other into the past. With ‘Secondhand Daylight’, Eugen Bacon & Andrew Hook have crafted a page-turner that will leave readers wanting to go back to the beginning after the end in this time-loop of a story. Brilliant and though-provoking.
Alistair Conwell
Circadian Web: The Space of Time A Novel

[Clare Rhoden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Time travel tales don’t get much better than this. Secondhand Daylight is a book of two halves that dovetails inventively into a substantial whole. This story sassily disappears some of your time as your eyes superglue to the page.
Secondhand Daylight is playful, credible and clever: science fiction in the best tradition of ‘what if?’. It seizes reader buy-in to the welfare of Green and Zada. Of particular interest is the sound envisioning of the near-ish future, post-Covid world.
An engrossing read, Secondhand Daylight is perfect for lovers of classy sci-fi and the enigmatic continuum of space-time. Let Zada and Green show you just how valuable each moment is.

[Maddison Stoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bacon and Hook’s novel Secondhand Daylight is an emotive and kinetic take on time-travel fiction, where magical realism and hard sci-fi collide to form an innovative and poetic narrative which fans of 80’s post punk and books like This Is How You Lose The Time War will certainly enjoy. The book is subtly queer and tinged with social commentary too, showing Melbourne changing through the eyes of two distinct and well-realized protagonists, starting in the recent past, and offering a surprisingly hopeful vision of a future yet to come.

[Wole Talabi]

Secondhand Daylight is a fast-paced, cleverly constructed novel told from two points of view, and which takes place over a series of jumps both forward and backward across time. Bacon and Hook have made magic here. Focused more on ruminations of meaning and relationships and heart than details of time-travel technology, this engaging story is beautifully written with many lovely turns of phrase, its flawed and broken characters are fully realized and reading it is very likely to be an enjoyably good use of your own time.

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read an ARC of this wonderful book so that I might provide a blurb if I enjoyed it. As you can see below, I truly did.

“Beautifully disjointed and exquisitely nuanced, Bacon and Hook have deftly created a transgressive, dislocated narrative that will have readers losing hours as efficiently as a time slip.” - Dave Jeffery, author of the A QUIET APOCALYPSE series.

[K.C. Grifant · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received an ARC of this book and found it intriguing and poetic. This ambitious story combines hypnotic writing with a gritty cynicism reminiscent of William Gibson. Whether lost on the dance floor or to the mysteries of time, the story of the main characters’ stubborn survivalism will pull you in and not let go.

[Louise Page · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very clever book, something that you do not entirely expect. But I did have a hard time reading it, as the writing style feels like a jumble of words and thoughts all pushed out together. That may well be the point, but that did make it harder to read and enjoy, and took me twice as long as it probably should have. An interesting concept, but I just found the delivery difficult.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice premise with mixed execution. I liked this overall, but it is uneven, and some readers may find it difficult to follow at times. I'm not sure if this had the wrong editor or if it's just me. I'm sure some readers will be more enthusiastic than I.

Thanks very much for the free ARC for review!!

[Melissa Bezushko]

Unfortunately I was not able to push through and finish this. The premise was interesting to me, but I didn't like the writing style and couldn't get past it. The main character (at least in the first third) was not very likeable, and didn't seem overly concerned with his time skips. Hopefully this book finds its audience, but I am not it.

[Carmelina · Rating 5 out of 5]

As well as the way unique way time travel was used in Secondhand Daylight, I enjoyed the way the story built and revealed itself with each chapter. The suspense of finding out the ending kept me turning the pages. A good read.

[Cat Treadwell · Rating 1 out of 5]

I premise of this story was interesting, but from the start I was confused. The writing style seemed so disjointed, with unexplained slang that left me feeling lost - frankly, I didn’t understand it. And I enjoyed A Clockwork Orange.

Confusing and impenetrable. Sorry, DNF.

[Veronica Strachan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mind bending time travel and Melbourne landmarks. As always, Eugen Bacon has stamped her unique voice in Secondhand Daylight, ably co-authored by Andrew Hook. A challenging quirky read that balances blink of an eye time travel with an exploration of family, friend and lover relationships in a somewhat enviable future Australia.
Needs to be read in a quiet place where you can concentrate on the loops and swirls of the two main characters as they bounce around the timestream. Delightful, evocative, spare prose.
A great read.

[Scott Vandervalk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Secondhand Daylight is a tale of characters entwined back and forth across time that picks Green and Zada apart as they try to find themselves, to discover purpose, and maybe find each other. Everything ripples off the page—words, phrases skilfully evoking place and character.—Scott Vandervalk, author and editor of Aurealis