IN TIME WITH YOU

A grief-stricken young college student discovers that love and loss can tangle time itself in this moody, slow-burn story.

After her boyfriend Carter’s funeral, art student Nieve Monroe drifts through a summer steeped in guilt and tinged with emotionally resonant colors. Raised by her superstitious maternal grandmother, Grandee, whose mystical sayings once felt foolish, Nieve now sees meaning in every hue: black for loss, red for love, indigo for goodbye. When she returns to Suttleton Academy of Fine Arts, classmates whisper that she’s responsible for Carter’s drowning, although Nieve can’t remember what really happened. Her cousin, Linden, and Carter’s furious best friend, Max, orbit her grief until a supernatural twist, foreshadowed by Grandee’s belief that time is “a fickle thing—a story,” allows Nieve to travel back in time to the first day of college. Aching realism is balanced with luminous magic, and Dwyer’s prose feels painted rather than written: Her language shimmers with sensory detail and emotional honesty. Nieve is caught in a loop of pain and healing, continually re-experiencing fragments of the past. Nieve’s voice—sarcastic, self-punishing, and sincere—offers an anchor through the fog of mourning. A romance that follows offers her a way to reclaim her own color-saturated identity, making the time-loop device a metaphor for healing. This textured novel offers catharsis as much as closure. Main characters are cued white.

A lyrical exploration of grief, art, and what remains when love runs out of time.