A Crime in Spacetime

About this book

Imagine that your life was nothing but a faint echo of another life you live in a parallel universe, and that your most intimate or saddest moments are merely a memory your mind saw years before they happened. This is the world into which Noah El-Din El-Shawaf was born. From earliest childhood, Noah carried a burden his weak eyes could not understand. At four years old, when his vision was "like a thick cloud," his feet led him to the clinic of a doctor named Hakeem, and there Noah received no prescription to strengthen his sight but an inheritance heavier than mountains: a thin-framed pair of glasses, its lens "glittering with the sparkle of distant planets" — not a mere visual aid but a mirror of time. With the first flash of the mysterious lenses, the heart of time shook violently, and Noah saw what no human should see: luminous fragments of passing scenes — an ancient desert and a fire consuming a city. The repetition began to increase, and Noah realized that what he saw was no ordinary déjà vu but detailed visions exceeding any passing scene. Are these visions a gift, a curse, or a crime committed in the spacetime of fate itself? A science-fiction mystery where the detective is a child, the weapon is memory, and the scene of the crime is time itself — asking whether knowing tomorrow is salvation or the heaviest sentence.