From TV personality and radio host Bill Flanagan comes a “funny and sharp” (Rosanne Cash, Grammy Award–winning singer/songwriter and bestselling author) time-traveling adventure novel about how the past never gives up its hold on the present and how even sixty-five-year-olds are still kids at heart.
If you had the chance to live your life over again, knowing everything that you know now, would you take it? Would you still take it if it meant losing everything you had today? Would a second chance to correct every mistake and missed opportunity be worth giving up the world you know and the life you have built? In Fifty in Reverse, fifteen-year-old Peter Wyatt does just that.
In the spring of 1970, Harvard psychologist Terry Canyon is introduced to Peter, a quiet kid from a wealthy family who has been suspended from ninth grade for stripping off his clothes in Algebra class. When Terry asks Peter why he did, the boy explains that he was trying to “shock myself awake.” It turns out that Peter believes he is a sixty-five-year-old man who went to sleep in his home in New York in the year 2020 and woke up in his childhood bedroom fifty years earlier.
Hilariously depicting Peter’s attempts to fit in as a fifteen-year-old in 1970 and to cope with the tedium, foolishness, and sexual temptations of high school as he tries to retain the sense of himself as a sixty-five-year-old man, Fifty in Reverse is a thought-provoking and enlightening novel about second chances and appreciating where you are in life.
“Bill Flanagan has inherited the spirit of Kurt Vonnegut and written us a sharp, funny, charming novel about the enduring fantasy of living a life twice. What if we could live knowing what we know now? And what might happen to those around us? This is a wonderful comedy with a distinct social undertow." —Colum Mccann
“A strikingly original novel, immensely enjoyable to read.” —Salman Rushdie
"...there are chapters of lovely insight into the human condition, and wonderful depictions of longing and connection...a quick and enjoyable read, especially if you know Seventies rock."—Katie Stine, Historical Novel Society
“If HG Wells had imagined a jukebox rather than “Time Machine” he might still not have located the humour and the heart in this wonderful tale." –Elvis Costello, GRAMMY-winning singer/songwriter and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer
