The Desert Road Unspools
A Time-Slip Novel Told Backward

About this book:

The dashboard clock ticks backward. The odometer unspools mile by mile. And the desert road Clara drives doesn't just end—it unravels, peeling back layers of time to reveal a stagecoach where her Subaru should be, a missing brother who hasn't vanished yet, and a silver pocket watch that runs counterclockwise like a heart beating in reverse.

Julian went into the Mojave chasing ghost towns and stagecoach lines. Two weeks later, his truck sits abandoned with no tracks leading away. But when Clara follows his reverse-engineered journal to where the asphalt dies, she doesn't find a crime scene—she finds 1883. The well is fouled. The stage isn't running. And the boy with the silver watch has already left his post. To save him, she'll have to drive backward through the stratigraphy of the desert, where every mile marker passed is a year reclaimed, every dust cloud a century inhaled, and the only way forward is deeper into the past.

Told in reverse chapter order—from the end of the asphalt to before the road was made—*The Desert Road Unspools* is a time-slip thriller that reads like a fever dream etched in alkali dust. For readers who loved the temporal puzzles of *The Time Traveler's Wife* and the mythic landscapes of Cormac McCarthy, this is a novel about the fault lines between eras, the brothers and sisters we'd burn centuries to reach, and the terrible, beautiful truth that sometimes you have to unlive your life to find the person you lost.