A River Called Time (Canongate/Akashic), the latest novel by Courttia Newland — a British writer with Barbadian roots — is an ambitious speculative fiction offering alternate histories of London through parallel and sometimes dystopian timelines, which intersect in the consciousness of the protagonist. Combining the plot of a thriller with deep delves into physics and metaphysics, and an enquiry into the pervasiveness of social inequality, the novel imagines an alternate world in which colonialism and slavery never happened, and the contact between Europe and Africa unfolded in a spirit of openness and exchange.