National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award winner Charles Yu delivers his debut novel, a razor-sharp, ridiculously funny, and utterly touching story of a son searching for his father . . . through quantum space-time. Minor Universe 31 is a vast story-space on the outskirts of fiction, where paradox fluctuates like the stock market, lonely sexbots beckon failed protagonists, and time-travel is serious business. Every day, people get into time machines and try to do the one thing they should never do: change the past. Thats where Charles Yu, time travel technician-part counselor, part gadget repair man-steps in. He helps save people from themselves. Literally. When hers not taking client calls, Yu visits his mother (stuck in a onehour cycle, she makes dinner over and over and over) and searches for his father, who invented time travel and then vanished. Accompanied by TAMMY, an operating system with low self-esteem, and a nonexistent but ontologically valid dog named Ed, and using a book titledHow to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universeas his guide, Yu sets out, and back, and beyond, in order to find the one day where he and his father can meet in memory. With echoes of both Mark Danielewski and Douglas Adams, yet altogether wildly new and adventurous, Yurs"s debut is certain to send shock waves of wonder through literary space-time.

CHARLES YU received the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award for his story collection Third Class Superhero, and he has also received the Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award. His work has been published in the Harvard Review, the Alaska Quarterly Review, The Mississippi Review, and the Mid-American Review, among other journals. He lives in Los Angeles.