Hazards of Time Travel

An ingenious dystopian novel of one young woman's resistance against the constraints of an oppressive society

“Joyce Carol Oates reinvents the genre to create a brilliant story of love and exile.” — James Gleick
“Oates’s writing has always seemed effortless: urgent, unafraid, torrential. She writes like a woman who walks into rough country and doesn’t look back.” — New York Times Book Review
“A master of sharp dialogue and vibrant descriptions, Oates casts a powerful spell.” — People
“The most consistently inventive, brilliant, curious, and creative writer going, as far as I’m concerned.” — Gillian Flynn
“Oates is still casting some awfully dark magic.” — The Washington Post

“Time travel”—and its hazards—are made literal in this astonishing new novel in which a recklessly idealistic girl dares to test the perimeters of her tightly controlled (future) world and is punished by being sent back in time to a region of North America—“Wainscotia, Wisconsin”—that existed eighty years before. Cast adrift in time in this idyllic mid-western town, she is set upon a course of “rehabilitation”—but cannot resist falling in love with a fellow exile and question-ing the constrains of the Wainscotia world with results that are both devastating and liberating. 
Arresting and visionary, Hazards of Time Travel is both a novel of harrowing discovery and an exquisitely wrought love story that may be Joyce Carol Oates’s most unexpected novel so far.