PARIS ADRIFT

It is the near future and humanity is on the brink of destruction. The only way it can be saved is if the course of history is forcibly altered. In the twenty first century, misfit student Hallie Lane packs up her troubled life in England and takes the first train to Paris, where she falls in with the eclectic expat community as a bartender at the notorious Millie's.

Here she finds a new family, and an attraction to the enigmatic Leon. But Millie's is not all that it seems: inside, there's a time portal in the keg room with an inescapable hold on her. As if that's not strange enough, she receives garbled warnings from a bizarre creature and keeps meeting a mysterious woman claiming to be a time agent.

Soon, she is navigating through the city's turbulent past and future – from the wild years after the French Revolution, through the horrors of the Nazi occupation, and to a grim near future of her own making. But with only Leon to guide her in this fractured world, it soon becomes apparent that she is an unwitting pawn in a much bigger plan and the key to humanity's future lies in her hands.

E.J. Swift spent 18 months living and working in Paris before returning to London to complete her MA in Creative Writing programme at Royal Holloway. Her short fiction has appeared in Interzone and in anthologies from Salt Publishing, Jurassic London and NewCon Press. It also been shortlisted for a BSFA Award and longlisted for ?e Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award. Her debut novel OSIRIS was published in 2013.