Version Control
Rebecca Wright lives in a near-future America where every car drives itself, every screen serves targeted ads, and her physicist husband has spent a decade building a "causality violation device" he refuses to call a time machine. Their marriage cracked when their young son died, and Rebecca has spent the years since drinking too much and working customer service for an online dating site. The book opens with Rebecca walking through her life with a low background hum that something is wrong. Palmer takes 200 pages of literary prose before the science kicks in, and when it does the reader has been set up for a reveal that lands harder than the genre-shelf version of this premise.
Where Version Control keeps showing up
One of our editors' lists features this novel.
What you might want to know about Version Control
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A near-future literary novel about a physicist building a time machine and the wife who senses something has gone wrong with her life, before the science kicks in.
Yes, but quietly. Most of the book reads as a literary novel about marriage and grief, with a science fiction premise that surfaces gradually.
The structure plays with timelines, but the prose is clear. Readers who liked the slow build of Station Eleven or Sea of Tranquility tend to settle in quickly.
Version Control was written by Dexter Palmer, published in 2016 by Vintage Books.
Version Control is 495 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Version Control takes most readers 7 to 11 hours to finish.
Version Control is a standalone novel by Dexter Palmer, not part of a series.
Version Control is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.