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On the last day of an archaeological dig on a wild island, a professor and one of his top students discover something big in a hidden cave filled with sand. Little do they know that this archaeological discovery—far from becoming merely a record in a university-sponsored research trip report—will set off a series of momentous events. This golden cylinder, an easy fit in the palm of one's hand, sends its owner back in time for a few minutes, hours, or even weeks and years. Shifting in time only lets the one holding the talisman remember events from the previous timeline. Everyone else relives the day or year as it happened before. Just as the One Ring irreversibly tangled the lives, motivations, and obsessions and tested the inner strength of travel companions in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, the professor and a few of his students experiment with the talisman's powers, only to pay the cost for their actions.
The thrill of traveling back in time carries dark, mysterious undercurrents, as in H.G. Wells' The Invisible Man. While many popular time-travel novels, short stories, movies, and TV shows treat a time-traveling main character as a hero who rights the wrongs of history, it's refreshing to dive into a darker time-travel novel with fully fledged, complex characters, deftly handled plot twists, and what life might really be like as a time-traveler. As incredible as it is to watch sand glow like golden dust around one, like in the movie Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, the cold rush of a day's sunshine into the night's darkness, or fear pooling in one's stomach at the thought of going back in time too far for rescue are warnings the story inspires one to heed in the present day.
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