Present Tense Machine by Gunnhild Øyehaug

And now time for something beguilingly weird and uncannily strange. A trip down split memory lanes of a family torn by quantum physics. A life split into parallels and followed along as mother and daughter find themselves navigating alternate universes.
This Moebius tape of a novel is difficult to explain or sum up in any other way and it is very much unlike most parallel worlds stories I read. Those tend to veer more into science fiction thriller territory, but this one very much remains a family drama, albeit in a pretty unconventional arrangement.
This kind of book can easily be done wrong, but the author did it just right. Was it the Scandinavian succinctness? The first rate character writing and development? The conceptual originality? The cleverness of it all? The overall brevity? Well, it must have been.
The writing style is usually dense, clumped together, dialogue and all, but somehow it works here. There’s a hypnotic quality to the author’s writing that’s strangely immersive. It’s such a quick read, it goes by like an odd moody slightly surreal dream, all watercolors and ambiance. I don’t think it’ll work for everyone, there’s a very specific tonality to it, but it worked for me. Thanks Netgalley.