America is in the grip of a deadly flu pandemic. When Frank catches the virus, his girlfriend Polly will do whatever it takes to save him, even if it means risking everything. A literary love story about two people who are at once mere weeks and many years apart.
[An Ocean of Minutes] draws on the best of old and new CanLit traditions ... The clear-eyed, evocative writing here is reminiscent of Margaret Atwood, and anyone familiar with The Handmaid’s Tale will find resonance in these pages ... Lim may be writing in the CanLit tradition, but her voice is all her own ... [She] comes into her own here, with prose that’s elegant and haunting, somehow managing to be both unsentimental and deeply moving at the same time. A devastating debut.
An Ocean of Minutes has a premise to thrill ... While Polly is not the most compelling woman to grace the pages of literature, the reader still shares in her heartbreak ... One of Lim’s greatest successes in her debut novel...is creating a future that is so completely imbued with bureaucratic nonsense that it as maddening as it is believable.
At first blush, the premise of Lim’s dystopian novel is a familiar one: a deadly flu pandemic sweeps across the world in the early 1980s. But the solution is inventive ... An intriguing and unique entry in the crowded dystopian landscape.
