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My Twelve-Year-Old Wife: Erased Memories
My Twelve-Year-Old Wife: Erased Memories drops the reader straight into a world where time folds, grief bites hard, and reality keeps shifting under the characters’ feet. The book follows Dan, a man who loses his wife brutally, then hurls himself backward through time to save her. He lands in 2003 and discovers a teenage version of Celia, a younger and sharper incarnation of the woman he loved, and a chilling truth about Lang, the man who killed her. As Dan struggles to protect her, time glitches, memories warp, and past and future versions of Lang collide. The story moves fast, and the stakes sit right at the throat from the opening chapter.
I kept feeling the tension coil in my chest whenever Dan slipped between timelines. His heartbreak is loud. His fear is louder. I found myself rooting for him even when he made choices that scared me. The writing surprised me with small, quiet moments tucked between scenes of dread. A breakfast. A joke. A breath of calm before the ground cracked open. They made the danger feel personal instead of mechanical, and I loved that steady tug between ordinary life and cosmic consequences. There were times when the dialogue carried more weight than the action itself, and those were the moments that resonated with me.
Time travel is usually all rules and logic, but here it felt messy and emotional, which I liked. Time behaves like a living thing. It twitches when Dan pushes it. It punishes him when he presses too hard. I also appreciated how the author handled trauma. Nothing is graphic, but the emotional fallout hit real. Celia’s distrust, Dan’s guilt, the thin places in the world that react to their fear, all of it landed with a strange mix of warmth and dread. I kept forgetting to breathe during the scenes under the bleachers, especially when the masked figure flickered in and out of sight. The writing there felt sharp and cold in the best way.
I would recommend this book to readers who enjoy psychological thrillers with a strong emotional core, and to anyone who likes their time travel tangled with heartbreak instead of gadgets. If you want a story that creeps under your skin and sits there long after the last page, this is a good one. Author Dan Uselton turns time itself into a monster, and the result is unforgettable.
Pages: 323 | ASIN : B0G2FLTQSP
Challenging Themes
I Know You follows a Scottish teenager who, after an argument with her boyfriend, is knocked unconscious and wakes up in the past at an Ethiopian refugee camp and spends the next 48 hours traveling through time. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
When my younger (and quite feisty) daughter was a teenager, I used to take great delight in teasing her by adopting rather unPC attitudes which I knew she would be unable to resist challenging. That experience provided the kernel of an idea. I thought it might be fun to have two characters of similar age but with world views formed half a century apart, thrown together. Clearly, such a situation is fantastical, so I felt that any construction that ‘explained’ the phenomenon would be fine. I was keen to establish the protagonist, Eilidh, as a bright but fairly typical late teenager – hence the early argument with the boyfriend. I also wanted to establish her as a time traveller and also someone with quite a lot about her, as well as introducing the link to Walter (the other main character). Given that Walter was born fifty years before her, that provided the window in which any meetings would have to take place. I chose Ethiopia in 1984 as it would show how Eilidh responded to being thrown into a nightmarish scenario, and allow me to introduce Walter in a low-key manner that didn’t give the game away too early.
Eilidh is transported to various locations and times over a period of 48 hours. Were you concerned about disorienting readers, or was that emotional confusion part of the intention?
I wasn’t at all concerned about disorienting readers, which might identify me as not caring about my audience! I was aware that the sudden jumps through time and space, allied to the pace at which the narrative moved, could be disorienting, but I felt that might help readers to identify more closely with what Eilidh was experiencing.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
In truth, the book is a somewhat self-indulgent exercise. I hadn’t enjoyed writing my previous novel and decided that, no matter what, I was going to enjoy producing this one. So, I chucked as many of the things that matter to me as I could think of into the pot – family, Scotland, relationships, sci-fi, love, humour, music, football (soccer), friendship. Although the story is clearly fantastical, I wanted it to still bear a few hallmarks of authenticity, so I included some of the more challenging themes that life throws at us – bereavement, illness, and the tragedy of someone close succumbing to dementia. I didn’t want those themes to overwhelm the narrative, but I did want to treat them with respect and sensitivity. I hope I managed that.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when can your fans expect it to be out?
I’ve written a sci-fi yarn set in a near-future world dominated by competing AIs, focused on a tiny number of humans who happen to be telepathic. Any publisher who has shown interest has expressed the desire that the book be one of a series. I don’t have the appetite to write another of those (at least not yet), so I don’t think that’s going anywhere. Subsequently, I’ve just finished a particularly dark psycho-sexual thriller with what I think is a pretty surprising twist. Now I need to summon the energy to get on the publisher/agent treadmill! Meantime, I have a half-formed idea for a new novel, which is probably more like I Know You than anything else I’ve written.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Website | Amazon
Eilidh, bright, headstrong and feisty, gets sparkling exam results that confirm her university place. Her boyfriend reveals he has deceived her. In the ensuing argument she is knocked unconscious. She arrives in 1984, in an Ethiopian refugee camp, where she nurses a dying child, then a wounded aid worker before wakening back home in present-day Scotland. Three days later, at an isolated beauty spot trying to come to terms with her ex boyfriend’s betrayal and her experience in Ethiopia, she encounters Walter, who is in the early stages of dementia. He is there because of a tattoo on his wrist that simply states the date and location of the beauty spot. Eilidh recognises Walter’s symptoms, takes him home and contacts his niece to come and collect him.
Over the following 48-hour period Eilidh finds herself transported to various locations in Europe and North America, and time periods from the previous fifty years. Each episode draws her further into an unexpected and unconventional romance. Eventually she travels to WW2 blitzed Liverpool and meets a fellow time traveller who explains that Eilidh faces a decision with life and death consequences.
Army of Three
Army of Three follows the Fassbinder brothers through a life shaped by loss, love, violence, and the weight of impossible gifts. The story opens small and personal, then builds into something that stretches across decades, worlds, and even versions of reality. It starts with two young men chasing criminals at night and grows into a tale about loyalty, grief, and destiny. Along the way we meet Azrael, a mysterious and powerful woman whose bond with Axel becomes the heart of the book, and later we see how her death fractures everything the brothers knew. By the time I reached the final pages, the story had folded back on itself in ways that felt both surprising and strangely right, and the letter from Karl brought a quiet and emotional sense of closure.
The writing is straightforward, yet it carries a sincerity that makes the emotional moments land with real weight. Scenes like Axel holding Azrael after the attack shook me. His heartbreak felt blunt and unfiltered. The author is not afraid to lean into big feelings, and the story benefits from that. I liked how the quieter moments in forests or diners or rooftops created space for the characters to breathe. Those scenes let me sit with them, and I grew to care about them, even when they made choices that frustrated me. There is an earnestness to the prose that makes the chaos of superhuman fights and government conspiracies feel grounded.
I also found myself surprised by how much the book weighs in questions of fate and identity. Axel’s struggle to figure out what kind of man he wants to be resonated with me. The story plays with the idea that heroism is not clean or noble, and sometimes it is just two broken people trying to survive what life handed them. Karl’s evolution unfolded cleanly and was emotionally potent as well. Watching him carry the burden of protecting his brother and then eventually writing that final letter made him feel painfully human. Even the supernatural touches, like Azrael’s powers and the strange forces lurking in the dark, worked best when they mirrored the characters’ inner fears. Sometimes I wanted the pacing to slow a bit so I could sit longer with those moments, but the urgency of the plot has its own appeal.
The story closes in a way that honors its emotional core, and it left me thinking about sacrifice and second chances. I would recommend Army of Three to readers who enjoy character-driven science fiction and action stories that are fueled by emotion as much as spectacle. It is a good fit for anyone who likes tales about brothers, unlikely heroes, and love that changes the course of a life.
Pages: 219 | ASIN : B0G26F47K1
Operation Archer 2nd Edition.
Operation Archer is a wartime time-travel thriller that follows Simon — a grieving engineer in 2027 — whose recurring nightmares and unresolved trauma lead him to seek hypnotherapy. What begins as an attempt to heal from the anguish caused by his wife Lorna’s preventable death develops into something far stranger, as Simon’s sessions unlock vivid recollections of flying RAF bombers in WWII. Soon, the boundaries between memory, imagination and reality vanish until he participates in a dangerous mission with life – changing consequences. The book blends historical fiction with speculative adventure, grounding its big swings in a character who feels painfully human.
Beyond the aerial action, hypnotherapy and intrigue, this is really a story about grief and the mind’s strange ways of restoring balance after it has been shattered. The early chapters are heavy with loss. Simon’s memories of Lorna feel tender and raw, and his anger toward the medical system is explored in a way that feels honest rather than melodramatic. When the book shifts into regression, past-life imagery, and eventually full time-travel, the transition works better than I expected because the emotional groundwork is so solid. I found myself believing the unbelievable simply because Simon did, and because the narrative lets his curiosity and vulnerability drive the plot rather than spectacle alone.
The author makes some bold choices, especially in how he describes the procedural details of hypnosis, RAF aviation, and wartime operations in great detail. Sometimes I caught myself wishing the pace would move a little quicker, but then I would hit a passage where the sensory detail pulled me right back in. The roar of Merlin engines. The searing heat of a burning bomber’s fuselage. The eerie quiet of a hypnotic induction. When these moments appear, they feel less like exposition and more like slipping into someone else’s skin. And I appreciated the book’s willingness to stretch genre boundaries. It is a mixture of historical and science fiction plus psychological drama, which gives it a strange charm.
Operation Archer is reflective, occasionally surprising, and anchored by a protagonist whose pain feels real even when the plot turns surreal. If you enjoy historical thrillers with a speculative twist, or character-driven stories that explore trauma and transformation, you’ll enjoy this book. Readers who love World War Two aviation fiction or time-travel adventures will feel especially at home here. For me, Operation Archer is a compelling blend of heart, history, and imagination.
Pages: 223 | ASIN : B0G52L2ZL3
Quantum Weirdness
Diverging Streams follows two young lovers who, after an accident, are separated and reunited twenty years later by another accident, leaving them with the ability to travel through time and dimensions. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I began working on this book over 30 years ago, and I really don’t remember any particular inspiration for it. At one point, in 2008, I gave up on it and published Chapters 2 and 3 as a stand-alone short story, but about 2010, I took it up again and finished it in 2015.
Your novel has some interesting characters with their own flaws, yet they are still likable. How do you go about creating characters for your story?
I know it sounds corny, but I listen to my characters and allow them to develop their own personalities. I like to compare it to those old Max Fleischer cartoons in which Betty Boop or Koko the Clown climbs out of the ink bottle onto the paper. And once the characters are fully developed, I let them write the story for me. I feel more like an observer than the creator.
The science inserted in the fiction, I felt, was well balanced. How did you manage to keep it grounded while still providing the fantastic edge science fiction stories usually provide?
I have long believed that time, like space, is three-dimensional, which I maintain offers the best explanation for quantum weirdness. The world I have created—the constantly dividing and diverging time streams, each with its own unique reality, follows necessarily from multidimensional time. Although the afterlife, as I have described it, is more speculative, it is perhaps more a case of probable than merely possible.
Will this novel be the start of a series, or are you working on a different story?
I have no interest in further pursuing this story. I have finished two more novels: Conniption Creek, a dark comedy in the tradition of Catch 22, and The Swing Time Soda Emporium, a coming-of-age story set in small-town America during the 1940s, which I hope to publish by late this year or early next.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
Consistent with the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics, time—like space—is three-dimensional, with a nearly infinite number of constantly dividing and diverging time streams, each stream containing its own unique reality.
I Know You
I Know You follows Eilidh, a Scottish teenager whose life flips from exam day nerves to heartbreak to something far stranger. What begins as a coming-of-age story full of friendship, grief, and young love suddenly veers into a haunting experience in an Ethiopian refugee camp, where suffering, compassion, and disorientation collide. The book jumps between timelines and perspectives in a way that keeps you leaning forward, trying to stitch the pieces together just as the characters try to make sense of their own fractured realities. It feels intimate at times and then shockingly vast, almost like two novels braided into one.
The opening stretch, set in Scotland, felt light on the surface, but it carried an ache that hit me harder as the chapters moved on. The writing holds a kind of gentle honesty. It stays close to Eilidh’s emotions without dressing them up, and it lets her teenage certainty sit right beside her unravelling doubts. When the story shifts into the chaos and brutality of the camp, the tone changes sharply. I felt the ground move under me just as she does. Those sections knocked the breath out of me. They were raw, unsettling, and written with a restraint that made everything feel even more real. I kept pausing, not because I needed a break from the book, but because the moments asked for you to think about them for a moment.
There were points where the transitions left me a little lost. Even so, the emotional core held everything together for me. The scenes of care, fear, and tiny human connections had me thinking about them and the story for a while afterwards. And the way the book treats memory and trauma felt honest. Messy. Human. I appreciated that it didn’t try to explain everything. It trusted me to sit with uncertainty, and that trust made the story hit deeper.
This is the kind of novel I’d hand to readers who like character-driven stories that wander into unexpected territory, people who don’t mind when a book lifts them up just to pull the rug and make them feel something sharper. If you enjoy coming-of-age stories that refuse to stay tidy or narratives that mix tenderness with real darkness, you’ll enjoy reading this book.
Pages: 328 | ASIN : B0C545LJDG
Diverging Streams
Diverging Streams is a work of literary science fiction that blends time travel, alternate realities, and deeply human moments. The novel follows Haskell Yngren across multiple timelines, weaving together pivotal events from adolescence, adulthood, and parallel versions of his life. What begins as a vivid, often humorous barroom incident expands into a meditation on chance, memory, desire, and the small decisions that quietly fracture a life into many possible paths.
Author Earl L Carlson writes with a confident, old-fashioned storyteller’s rhythm, the kind that is unafraid to linger. He pauses to philosophize, to explain, to wander off briefly and then return. The prose is rich but not showy. He trusts long scenes and detailed observation, especially when he is writing about adolescence, embarrassment, longing, and those fragile moments when everything feels charged and irreversible. Some passages are genuinely funny, others almost uncomfortably intimate, and that contrast feels intentional.
The story leans into digressions and omniscient commentary, sometimes stepping well outside the action to reflect on culture, sexuality, or human cruelty. Still, those same detours are also where the book’s personality lives. The speculative elements are never flashy. This is not a fast, gadget-driven science fiction novel. Instead, the genre functions as a framework for asking what might have happened if a single moment tilted another way. The alternate timelines feel less like puzzles to solve and more like emotional echoes.
I felt that Diverging Streams is best suited for readers who enjoy reflective, character-driven speculative fiction. If you like science fiction that behaves more like literary fiction, are curious about time but deeply invested in memory, desire, and consequence, this book will likely resonate. It rewards patience and a willingness to sit with discomfort, humor, and nostalgia all at once.
Pages: 172 | ASIN : B0FP5TSF7T
Wooden Dolls Game
Wooden Dolls Game, written by Ivonne Hoyos, follows Mary Jane Crowell through a life shaped by family tension, a volatile sister, and a strange set of wooden dolls that lets her rewind time. The story begins with two little girls picking paint colors for their new bedrooms and unfolds into a tale about resentment, trauma, fate, and the high cost of trying to fix what cannot stay fixed. What starts as a simple childhood conflict grows into a sweeping journey through teenhood and adulthood, where Mary Jane desperately tries to undo tragic events using the dolls, and where every attempt triggers new ripples of chaos. It is a story about family wounds that never quite heal and the limits of love when time itself becomes a battleground.
The writing is direct and emotional in a way that sneaks up on you, and I found myself caring a lot about what happened. Scenes between the sisters made my chest tighten. Some moments felt painfully real, like the time Antonia destroys Mary Jane’s room in a wild burst of envy or the school fight that spirals into tragedy. The author captures the feeling of walking on eggshells around someone you love yet fear. I felt myself bracing every time Antonia entered a scene. The pacing moves fast, and sometimes the dialogue feels raw, but honestly, that worked for me because the characters live in a constant state of imbalance. Their world is never calm.
As the story leaned more into the supernatural element of rewinding time, I felt a mix of fascination and frustration, which I think is exactly what the book wanted me to feel. Every attempt to rewrite the past leads Mary Jane deeper into emotional exhaustion. I kept rooting for her and kept dreading what might go wrong next. The idea that fixing one tragedy only opens the door to another stayed with me. It made me think about how people carry their pain and how trying to rearrange life into something perfect can end up breaking everything. Even when the plot went dark, I stayed hooked because the emotional truth behind the events felt honest.
Wooden Dolls Game is a story for readers who enjoy family drama with sharp edges and for anyone who can handle a bit of heartbreak mixed with hope. If you like stories about sisters, trauma, time loops, and choices that echo forever, you’ll enjoy this book. For readers who enjoy a tense and emotional journey, Wooden Dolls Game is more than worth your time.
Pages: 353 | ASIN : B0CDJ8T2NX
