Old Year and The New

A mesmerizing 19th-century California novel that explores the strange borderland between memory and moment, between the self we were and the self we become. The story centers on a man who encounters his own past and future selves on a single New Year's Eve, discovering that time is not a river but a labyrinth where every corridor holds a version of who he was or will be. Rhodes weaves scientific curiosity with wild fancy, grounding impossible temporal wanderings in the solid facts of 1870s San Francisco. The result is both a ghost story and a meditation on choice, regret, and whether we can ever truly escape the people we have been. Sharp, melancholy, and unexpectedly funny, it captures the particular loneliness of looking backward and forward at once, of knowing that every ending contains a beginning and every new year carries the ghost of all the ones before.