Emma Straub is taking a trip back to the 1990s in her next novel.
Riverhead will publish Straub’s This Time Tomorrow next year, the Penguin Random House imprint announced in a news release. The publisher describes the book as “a little 13 Going on 30 with a delicious sprinkling of ’90s pop culture.”
The novel follows Alice, a woman with an ailing father who wakes up one day to find herself transported back to 1996. Straub told Entertainment Weekly that the book was inspired by her own father, famed horror novelist Peter Straub, who was hospitalized last year with heart problems.
Emma Straub, whose previous books include Modern Lovers and All Adults Here, kept news of her forthcoming book, which she wrote during the Covid-19 pandemic, a secret for several months.
“I guess I wanted to keep it just mine for as long as I could,” she said. “There is also the fact that the last few years have been really destabilizing, for all of us, and because this book is in some big ways a departure for me, I wanted to protect myself, and it.”
Riverhead says Straub’s book is “a different kind of love story—about the lifelong, reverberating relationship between a parent and child.”
This Time Tomorrow is scheduled for publication on May 17, 2022.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
