Many Worlds of Everett

Some decisions take four minutes. Others require seventeen imaginary lives, three existential crises, and, just to be safe, a quick review of every life in which you chose differently.

Everett has an extraordinary talent for making simple decisions complicated. Whenever he has to choose, his mind races ahead into every life that might follow. In one, he left. In another, he stayed. Somewhere else, he became a version of himself he could never have planned.

Those lives contain distant cities, journeys postponed for far too long, love, family, oceans, and goodbyes-along with the occasional decision that proves infinite possibilities do not necessarily improve a person's judgment.

At forty-seven, Everett wants something both simple and inconvenient: time to write, travel, love, and discover what a life chosen on purpose might look like. But every possible future contains something worth wanting, and choosing one means leaving all the others behind.

Lenna has an inconvenient habit of appearing just where Everett's questions stop being theoretical. She knows when he has wandered into a life that does not exist-and how to find him there, usually before the coffee gets cold.

Slowly, Everett begins to suspect something far more troubling than making the wrong choice: there may be more than one right one.

Warm, wistful, and absurdly funny, Many Worlds of Everett is a speculative novel about the paths we do not take, the people we never quite leave behind, and the strange grief of missing things that never happened. It contains distant places, impossible futures, questionable decisions, a certain amount of romance, and one goat with an unnecessarily firm opinion about literature.

Because perhaps life isn't about finding the perfect path.
Perhaps it begins when we stop trying to live every possible version of it.