Description: Nebula Award finalist Barbara Krasnoff's debut crosses many genres, spinning tales of sorcery, ghosts, time travel, virtual reality, alien contact, and elemental confrontations between good and evil. The book follows two Jewish immigrant families, one from Eastern Europe, one from Western Europe, whose destinies are mysteriously intertwined.
Brief description: Barbara Krasnoff was born and bred in Brooklyn, and has the accent to prove it. She has sold over 35 short stories to a variety of publications; Sabbath Wine, which appeared in Clockwork Phoenix 5, was a finalist for the 2016 Nebula Award. When not producing weird fiction, she works as Reviews Editor for The Verge and investigates what animals and objects are really thinking in her Backstories series on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (#theirbackstories). You can find her at BrooklynWriter.com or on Twitter as @BarbK.
Review Quotes:
"In story after story, the author reminds us that while we are all the main characters in our own stories, we are also characters in the stories of others, and that we are always influenced by those who have gone before just as we will influence those who will come after . . . Krasnoff reconfirms the book's central thesis that the past and future, the living and the dead, are inextricably intertwined--that even the brief presence of someone in our lives can alter our course and sometimes alter the course of the world."
--Strange Horizons
"If David Mitchell plotted a speculative novel-in-stories that then Alice Munro wrote, you might get something approaching the ambition and beauty of Krasnoff's The History of Soul 2065. Krasnoff creates a world so excessively alive, both with woe and human kindness, that history can't contain them."
--Carlos Hernandez, author of Sal and Gabi Break the Universe
"Barbara Krasnoff's great gift is for manifesting the invisible: immigrants and outcasts, the queer, the bereaved, elderly, children, ghosts. And, ah! The ghosts! The ghosts in The History of Soul 2065 arrive from both the past and the future to interact, and interfere, with each other and the living. Timelines tangle, bloodlines mingle, the mundane becomes magical."
--C. S. E. Cooney, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Bone Swans: Stories
"Reading The History of Soul 2065 is like looking through a photo album - and when you touch someone's photo, you get pulled into what they were going through at the moment the photo was taken . . . The History of Soul 2065 is so many things. It's a journey through the histories and dreams of two families, it's a magical realism way of finding hope when you feel lost, it's historical fantasy, it's far future science fiction."
--Little Red Reviewer