The Space Between Worlds

By: Micaiah Johnson

Narrated by: Nicole Lewis

Length: 11 hrs and 46 mins

Publisher's summary

The multiverse business is booming, but there's just one catch: no one can visit a world where their counterpart is still alive.

Enter Cara. Of the 382 realities that have been unlocked, Cara is dead in all but eight.

On this earth, however, she survived. Identified as an outlier and a perfect candidate for multiverse travel, Cara is plucked from the wastelands and given a job and a comfortable apartment in the wealthy and walled-off Wiley City. Cara knows what it's like to feel hungry and scared, so she's more than happy to reap the benefits of her new position. As long as she keeps her head down, she's on a sure path to citizenship and security for life.

But when one of her eight remaining doppelgängers dies under mysterious circumstances, Cara is plunged into a new world with an old secret. What she discovers will connect her past and future in ways she never could have imagined - and reveal her own role in a plot that endangers not just her world, but the entire multiverse.

©2020 Micaiah Johnson (P)2020 Penguin Random House Audio

A whiney excuse to use SF for social commentary.

I have no issue with the use of SF as a tool to express ideas and commentary on all sorts of human conditions. It has been doing this very succesfully for decades.
I do have a personal dislike of central characters that spend the entire first chapter telling the listener how badly done to they have been, how awful life is for the minority they identify with and how resentful they are of anyone who shows signs of respect or affection. I left the chapter feeling that I did not want to know this person nor how the rest of the book would evolve.
The naration was perfectly honed to match the character and as such it gets four stars.
Not for me.

Best Book I’ve listened to this year

I can’t recommend this enough, this book has a plot that kept me glued, a great pace and fully fleshed out characters for you to despise/root for as you wish. It will challenge your privilege and maybe even cause you to randomly undertake errands 20 miles away so you can listen in peace while driving.

Brilliant

A beautiful, complex, original novel by Micaiah Johnson, ably narrated by Nicole Lewis (who has a voice I could fall in love with). It tells the tale of a multiverse in which one Earth only has the technology to traverse the worlds. It comes at a cost: if the traversing individual lands in world where they already exist, they die painfully. There is only one exception to this rule. Set against the backdrop of a divided society in which the city dwellers have all and the out of towners very little, where tyrants enforce their rule with blood, the story hinges on the very reason only one Earth can traverse the multiverse and ultimately what the protagonist is going to do about it. It's also a story of love between two people from separate worlds and different social strata overcoming all obstacles to be together.

Highly recommended.

How to turn great premise into boring story

Nicole Lewis was a decent narrator with not much to work with. She was clear and well paced.

The book itself. This is a lesson in how to make a potentially interesting cross universe idea into a boring story. There seemed to be no emphasis on the travel or actual alternative worlds. A lot of time wasted on characters miserable origin. That's fine as long as the narrative moves forward after a while. But it didn't.

Just more of the same. I can see how this ended up on the half price list.

beautifully written sci-fi for heart & mind

Thank you to the author for re-invigorating this genre. An awesome story, beautifully well told. Sci-fi with depth of character (humans you actually care about and can actually connect to); a story with lightness; heft, and subtlety; serious personal and political action without guns! I felt the magic of the best of the best in this genre.

Depends on your expectations...

...I expected a sci-fi book and as such it's a very slow and rather depressing book, with women being offered no options but prostitution of different varieties and with abuse being normalised, which to me seemed like a sad lack of imagination.

After a while I changed my mindset though and listened to the book as a story about the consequences of making different choices based on prejudice on all sides and how the story changes based on minor adjustments to the characters' different choices. As such I rather enjoyed the book. Regardless, the narrator did a good job.

Very slow going, and exposition heavy.

I got about 90 minutes in before I just gave up. The narration is very good, but it doesn't save a story that seems to be going nowhere slowly. Not for me.

Beautiful

A beautiful, unique story that is both thrilling and thought-provoking. The main character is dynamic and completely relatable. The narration was perfect. I definitely recommend this one!

mesmerizing

the reader deserves 6 stars. a deeply thought provoking tale on so many levels thanks

Stunning in every way

If you enjoyed The Power, The Wire or The City and The City you'll love