Putnam’s Sons (US) One of the big books of 2026, Under Story by Chloe Benjamin, has a wonderful premise. What if there were an identical universe to ours, except that time runs in the opposite direction? And what if we could cross over from this universe to the “anti-universe” and then back again?
This is a human, warm and extremely ambitious book. Our hero, fungi expert Laurel Salter, having suffered a devastating loss, takes a job as a kitchen steward at an Antarctic research station. She makes friends with other workers and becomes fascinated with a strange light display in the distance called the “anomaly”.
We gradually come to realise that this light display could potentially be a crossing place to the anti-universe. Everything ramps up when Laurel’s ex-husband, a physicist named Eli Rosen, shows up to investigate the anomaly. Laurel wasn’t expecting him; they are barely on speaking terms.
Alert: a few mild spoilers ahead, but only because I need to explain what was (for me) a problem. Laurel’s story, and the way we go back and forth from the present-day Antarctic to her past and the heartbreak that happened, is all well done in the first half of the book. Arguably, it could have been edited – this is a long book – but if you don’t mind a languorous pace, and a lot of focus on side plots and side characters, then no biggie.
There’s a lot of science – about physics, Eli’s speciality, and also about fungi, Laurel’s speciality – arguably too much. Either way, all the science served to set me up for a book that was going to feel scientifically robust… which brings us to the nub of my problem. Of course, in a novel, universes can have time running backwards for some things but not others Eli and Laurel cross over to the anti-universe, for heartfelt reasons I won’t go into.
There, they duly find that time runs backwards. Politics, wars and so on happen in the reverse order to those in the regular universe. For example, Donald Trump is president before Barack Obama.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
