The 23rd Hero

NEW YORK TIMES essayist and 2025 Audie Awards® finalist 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.

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.

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0D3WKVP3X
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Castle Bridge Media
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ August 12, 2024
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 402 pages
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8989593415
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.3 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.01 x 9 inches