From the author of the bestselling book Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, GABRIELLE ZEVIN, comes a new tale of hope, love and redemption about Liz’s life after life.
Read on for an extract of Elsewhere …
ABOUT THE BOOK
Welcome to Elsewhere. It is warm, with a breeze, and the beaches are beautiful. It’s quiet and peaceful. You can’t get sick and you can’t get older. In Elsewhere, death is only the beginning …
Elsewhere is where fifteen-year-old Liz Hall ends up, after she is killed in a hit-and-run accident. It is a place very like Earth, yet completely different. Here Liz will age backwards from the day of her death until she becomes a baby again and returns to Earth. But Liz wants to turn sixteen, not 14 again. She wants to get her driving licence. She wants to graduate from high school and go to college. She doesn’t want to get to know a grandmother she’s never met before and have to make all-new friends.
How can Liz let go of the only life she has ever known and embrace a new one? Or is it possible that a life lived in reverse is no different from a life lived forward?
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Part I: The Nile
At Sea
Elizabeth Hall wakes in a strange bed in a strange room with the strange feeling that her sheets are trying to smother her.
Liz (who is Elizabeth to her teachers; Lizzie at home, except when she’s in trouble; and just plain Liz everywhere else in the world) sits up in bed, bumping her head on an unforeseen upper bunk. From above, a voice she does not recognise protests, ‘Aw hell!’
Liz peers into the top bunk, where a girl she has never seen before is sleeping, or at least trying to. The sleeping girl, who is near Liz’s own age, wears a white nightgown and has long dark hair arranged in a thatch of intricately beaded braids. To Liz, she looks like a queen.
‘Excuse me,’ Liz asks, ‘but would you happen to know where we are?’
The girl yawns and rubs the sleep out of her eyes. She glances from Liz to the ceiling to the floor to the window and then to Liz again. She touches her braids and sighs. ‘On a boat,’ she answers, stifling another yawn.
‘What do you mean ‘on a boat’?’
‘There’s water, lots and lots of it. Just look out the window,’ she replies before cocooning herself in the bedclothes. ‘Of course, you might have thought to do that without waking me.’
‘Sorry,’ Liz whispers.
Liz looks out the porthole that is parallel to her bed. Sure enough, she sees hundreds of miles of early-morning darkness and ocean in all directions, blanketed by a healthy coating of fog. If she squints, Liz can make out a boardwalk. There, she sees the forms of her parents and her little brother, Alvy. Ghostly and becoming smaller by the second, her father is crying and her mother is holding him. Despite the apparent distance, Alvy seems to be looking at Liz and waving. Ten seconds later, the fog swallows her family entirely.
Liz lies back in bed. Even though she feels remarkably awake, she knows she is dreaming, for several reasons: one, there is no earthly way she would be on a boat when she is supposed to be finishing tenth grade; two, if this is a vacation, her parents and Alvy, unfortunately, should be with her; and three, only in dreams can you see things you shouldn’t see, like your family on a boardwalk from hundreds of miles away. Just as Liz reaches four, she decides to get out of bed. What a waste, she thinks, to spend one’s dreams asleep.
Not wanting to further disturb the sleeping girl, Liz tiptoes across the room toward the bureau. The telltale sign that she is, indeed, at sea comes from the furniture: it is bolted to the floor. While she does not find the room unpleasant, Liz thinks it feels lonely and sad, as if many people had passed through it but none had decided to stay.
Liz opens the bureau drawers to see if they are empty. They are: not even a Bible. Although she tries to be very quiet, she loses her grip on the last drawer and it slams shut. This has the unfortunate effect of waking the sleeping girl again.
‘People are sleeping here!’ the girl yells.
‘I’m sorry. I was just checking the drawers. In case you were wondering, they’re empty,’ Liz apologizes, and sits on the lower bunk. ‘I like your hair by the way.’
The girl fingers her braids. ‘Thanks.’
‘What’s your name?’ Liz asks.
‘Thandiwe Washington, but I’m called Thandi.’
‘I’m Liz.’
Thandi yawns. ‘You 16?’
‘In August,’ Liz replies.
‘I turned 16 in January.’ Thandi looks into Liz’s bunk. ‘Liz,’ she says, turning the one syllable of Liz’s name into a slightly southern two, Li-iz, ‘you mind if I ask you a personal question?’
‘Not really.’
‘The thing is’—Thandi pauses—‘well, are you a skinhead or something?’
‘A skinhead? No, of course not.’ Liz raises a single eyebrow. ‘Why would you ask that?’
‘Like, ’cause you don’t have hair.’ Thandi points to Liz’s head which is completely bald except for the earliest sprouts of light blond growth.
Liz strokes her head with her hand, enjoying the odd smoothness of it. What hair there is feels like the feathers on a newborn chick. She gets out of bed and looks at her reflection in the mirror. Liz sees a slender girl of about 16 with very pale skin and greenish blue eyes. The girl, indeed, has no hair.
‘That’s strange,’ Liz says. In real life, Liz has long, straight blond hair that tangles easily.
‘Didn’t you know?’ Thandi asks.
Liz considers Thandi’s question. In the very back of her mind, she recalls lying on a cot in the middle of a blindingly bright room as her father shaved her head. No. Liz remembers that it wasn’t her father. She thought it was her father, because it had been a man near her father’s age. Liz definitely remembers crying, and hearing her mother say, ‘Don’t worry, Lizzie, it will all grow back.’ No, that isn’t right either. Liz hadn’t cried; her mother had been the one crying. For a moment, Liz tries to remember if this episode actually happened. She decides she doesn’t want to think about it any longer, so she asks Thandi, ‘Do you want to see what else is on the boat?’
‘Why not? I’m up now.’ Thandi climbs down from her bunk.
‘I wonder if there’s a hat in here somewhere,’ says Liz. Even in a dream, Liz isn’t sure she wants to be the freaky bald girl. She opens the closet and looks under the bed: both are as empty as the bureau.
‘Don’t feel bad about your hair, Liz,’ Thandi says gently.
‘I don’t. I just think it’s weird,’ Liz says.
‘Hey, I’ve got weird things, too.’ Thandi raises her canopy of braids like a theatre curtain. ‘Ta da,’ she says, revealing a small but deep, still-red wound at the base of her skull.
Although the wound is less than a half inch in diameter, Liz can tell it must have been the result of an extremely serious injury.
‘God, Thandi, I hope that doesn’t hurt.’
‘It did at first; it hurt like hell, but not anymore.’ Thandi lowers her hair. ‘I think it’s getting better actually.’
‘How did you get that?’
‘Don’t remember,’ says Thandi, rubbing the top of her head as if she could stimulate her memory with her hands. ‘It might have happened a long time ago, but it could have been yesterday, too, know what I mean?’
Liz nods. Although she doesn’t think Thandi makes any sense, Liz sees no point in arguing with the crazy sorts of people one meets in a dream.
‘We should go,’ Liz says.
On the way out, Thandi casts a cursory glance at herself in the mirror. ‘You think it matters that we’re both wearing pjs?’ she asks.
Liz looks at Thandi’s white nightgown. Liz herself is wearing white men’s-style pajamas. ‘Why would it matter?’ Liz asks, thinking it far worse to be bald than underdressed. ‘Besides, Thandi, what else do you wear while you’re dreaming?’ Liz places her hand on the doorknob. Someone somewhere once told Liz that she must never, under any circumstances, open a door in a dream. Since Liz can’t remember who the person was or why all doors must remain closed, she decides to ignore the advice.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GABRIELLE ZEVIN is a New York Times best-selling novelist whose books have been translated into 40 languages.
Her 10th novel, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, was a New York Times bestseller, a Sunday Times bestseller, and a selection of the Tonight Show’s Fallon Book Club. Tomorrow was Amazon.com’s #1 Book of the Year, Time Magazine’s #1 Book of the Year, a New York Times Notable Book, and the winner of both the Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction and the Book of the Month Club’s Book of the Year. Following a twenty-five-bidder auction, the feature film rights to Tomorrow were acquired by Temple Hill and Paramount Studios.
The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry also spent many months on the New York Times Best Seller List. A.J. Fikry was honored with the Southern California Independent Booksellers Award for Fiction, the Japan Booksellers’ Prize, among other honors. A J Fikry is now a feature film with a screenplay by Zevin. She has also written children’s books,.
She is the screenwriter of Conversations with Other Women (Helena Bonham Carter) for which she received an Independent Spirit Award Nomination for Best First Screenplay. She has occasionally written criticism for the New York Times Book Review and NPR’s All Things Considered, and she began her writing career, at age fourteen, as a music critic for the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. Zevin is a graduate of Harvard University.
She lives in Los Angeles.
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