Today on the site we’re revealing the cover of Gwendolyn Clare’s speculative YA, In the City of Time, which releases from Feiwel & Friends on November 29th and stars two queer POV characters, one pansexual and polyamorous and the other a trans lesbian! Here’s the story:
In 1891, Willa Marconi’s life falls apart when her mentor at the University of Bologna unexpectedly dies, but Willa refuses to let anyone take her research away. While testing her prototype radio equipment, she detects a mysterious signal and pursues its origin.
In 2034, a cataclysmic event has rendered Earth uninhabitable, and humankind survives by living inside artificial worlds. Riley would do anything for Jaideep, who lost his family in the collapse of the Bay Area pocket universe—and “anything” includes building a time machine so they can travel back to the nineteenth century to prevent the destabilization of the planet and rewrite history.
But the experiment goes wrong. Willa is pulled forward in time, and the three find themselves stranded in a strange, seemingly abandoned city. Now they’ve got a glitchy time machine, a scary android time cop hot on their trail—dead set on preserving the current timeline—and some tangled temporal mechanics to unravel. Can they save the Earth before there’s no Earth left to save?
And here’s the electrifying cover, designed by Sarah Kaufman!
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon | IndieBound
Gwendolyn Clare’s young adult novels include the steampunk duology Ink, Iron, and Glass and Mist, Metal, and Ash, set in the same universe as In the City of Time. Her short fiction has appeared in Analog, Asimov’s, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Clarkesworld, among others. She has a BA in Ecology, a BS in Geophysics, and a PhD in Mycology, and swears she’s done collecting acronyms. She lives in central Pennsylvania with too many cats and never enough books. You can find her geeking out over other people’s book covers on instagram @gwendolynclare and on twitter @gwendoclare.