The 23rd Hero

NEW YORK TIMES essayist and 2024 Reader’s Choice Award winner Rebecca Anne Nguyen’s stunning debut.

In The 23rd Hero, an ordinary woman with an extraordinary memory travels back in time to sixteenth-century France to stop climate change before it starts and return to the man she loves.

“Rebecca Anne Nguyen is so fierce, funny, rollicking, racy…The 23rd Hero is a page-turning, wild and marvelous ride.”

— Susan Choi, Pulitzer Prize finalist and National Book Award Winner for Trust Exercise

“Fans of time-travel romance are likely to find this…Outlander-esque adventure… deeply satisfying.” — Kirkus Reviews

“A unique and remarkable novel…a time-traveling adventure like no other.”

— Reader’s Choice Awards (2024 Bronze Winner for Best Adult Book)

In a world ravaged by climate change, a mysterious time travel agency known as the Program sends carefully selected Heroes back in time on missions to reverse the course of history, preventing environmental damage before it happens.

Sloane Burrows secretly longs to be a Hero and restore the natural world of her childhood, when gulls still soared above Coal Harbor and fish still swam in the sea. It’s a world she can envision with absolute clarity because of her superpower memory, which makes her exactly what the Program is looking for in a Hero. But her white father raised mixed-race Sloane to believe her “freak memory” is a shameful flaw that should be hidden from the world.

Sloane stuffs her dream of being a Hero and conceals her memory to the point of making herself sick. Her only respite from the constant nausea and shame is the recurring dream she’s been having for nearly a decade. In the dream, a breathtakingly beautiful man makes her feel accepted and loved in a way she never has in waking life—not despite her memory, but because of it.

But when the man in the dream shows up in real life, Sloane’s world is turned upside down. Not only is Bastian a flesh-and-blood person, but he’s from the Program, and he wants her to do the one thing that will shatter her chances of ever winning her dad’s love: become a Hero, travel back in time to sixteenth-century France, and use her superpower memory to save the world.

Advance Praise for The 23rd Hero:

“Rebecca Anne Nguyen is…unsparingly insightful about our talent for making a mess of things and irrepressibly optimistic about our chances for fixing them that she makes us eager to follow her anywhere, whether to times past or futures newly imagined. The 23rd Hero is a page-turning, wild and marvelous ride.”

— Susan Choi, Pulitzer Prize finalist and National Book Award Winner for Trust Exercise

“With an intriguing plot, beautifully written prose, and plenty of humor, this is a unique and remarkable novel. Fans of time-travel, eco-dystopian fiction, history and romance will love this story.”

— Reader’s Choice Awards (2024 Bronze Winner for Best Adult Book)

“Nguyen’s razor-sharp humor, gorgeous prose, and lush world-building had me turning pages late into the night.” — Jessica Pearce Rotondi, author of What We Inherit: A Secret War and a Family’s Search for Answers

"A breathtakingly original and gripping story — a fabulous debut!" — Melodie Winawer, acclaimed author of The Scribe of Siena and Anticipation

"A thrilling, escapist ride through time, an old-fashioned romance…and the story of a woman finding her purpose. This is a delightful page-turner by an exciting new voice in fiction. " — Mandy Berman, author of The Learning Curve and Perennials