markk

Helena "Hel" Nash is a resident of New York City, only it's not her New York City. Her New York City has been irradiated into uninhabitability, and she is one of the approximately 156,000 people who were lucky enough to escape through an experimental interdimensional portal before the end. Now a "Universally Displaced Person," she lives with another UDP and spends her days dwelling over the world that she left behind. While contemplating the divergent fates of a beloved science fiction author from her world, she decides to convert his home into a museum for UDPs, one memorializing the world they had lost by containing the remaining fragments from it.
 
In this novel, K Chess offers a different approach to the traditional alternate history novel. Whereas most such works thrive on the concept of difference, as refugees from a doomed world her characters are practically drowning in it. This allows Chess to hammer home the concept of alienation that these people feel, one that she underscores nicely by focusing on the small things in which people invest so much of their emotion and identity. The result transcends many of the other books of its genre to become a touching meditation about the relationship between identity and place, one richer for the considerable effort the author put into realizing the very different world to which her characters belonged.