It starts with Margo, an Irish girl alone on a train taking her to a new boarding school. But things get strange, and instead of taking her to Dublin it becomes a journey taking her out of our world. On board with her is Moon, a travelling salesman, who is clearly not of our world. It is lucky for Margo that he decides, despite all the arguments he can make against it, to help her. The destination that they reach is another world, one where the day is only a few hours long, where most lives are lived with hardscrabble frenetic desperation. It is linked to other worlds by trains; to the far north the day is only two hours long, but to south days get longer and lives get easier. But though Moon, as a salesman, travels through the worlds, the south can never be his home, as he is one of an almost extinguished race who once had their own passage ways apart from the southern controlled trains.
It is an awful lot for Margo to take in, even before she becomes hunted for no clear reason by thugs from the southern lands. Moon is the only thing keeping her safe...but there is little they can do except run. And when running leads them into the heart of the Northern rebellion against southern control, and the trains connecting the worlds begin to disappear, Margo begins to despair of ever getting home, and begins to question who she really is. And she begins to see Moon differently--not just the utterly strange young man whose life is so foreign to her own, but a person in his own right, with a haunting past and little hope for a future full of all the time in the world.
It is dizzying and riveting, and though the reader (me at least) is confused a lot, alongside Margo, it all starts to make sense, and while danger keeps being piled on danger, the reader's emotional connection to Margo and Moon becomes concomitantly greater, until the last third of the book wooshes by in a hurry of emotion and adventure (still mind-bending, but making more sense with every page).
And then, after totally investing me, the ending makes it clear (with a bang) that this is the start of a duology.
So it is time travel of a non-traditional sort in the sense of having to adjust to days of horribly different lengths, which comes at both a physical and a psychological cost, but it's also interesting to one interested in time travel fiction to see a world in which time as the thing of greatest value, functioning as the basis for social injustice. If you like your speculative fiction though-provoking with a soupçon of romance and social justice themes, and don't mind a bit of mental dizziness, it should be right up your alley!
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