A wrong turn at the office of unmade lists by Jane Rawson: 9 Feb, 2017

It's 1997 in San Francisco. Simon and Sarah are on a quest to stand in every 25-foot square of the United States at least once. Decades later, in Australian, Caddy is camped by the Maribyrnong River. She’s sick of being broke and alone. Caddy’s future changes when her friend, Ray, finds some well-worn maps—including one of San Francisco. Their lives connect with those of Simon and Sarah in ways that are both unexpected and profound.

A wrong turn at the office of unmade lists was the winner of the Most Underrated Book of 2014.

Jane Rawson will join us for a Q&A on Thursday, 9 February between 8 and 9pm. Please leave any questions you have below. (And discuss the book at your leisure!)

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Hey Jane,

Given the exponential change in both climate change and San Francisco's culture in the 10 years since publication, is there anything about your book that you would change?

Hi Matthew - that's a really interesting question. I definitely wouldn't change anything about the San Francisco sections - they're set in what Caddy imagines San Francisco would have been like in 1997, and that hasn't changed. But would I do the climate change scenarios differently? I don't think so. I definitely didn't want to write something completely apocalyptic, though that is maybe what we'll be facing by 2030. I wanted to write a slow disaster, something that was affecting some parts of society horribly and others barely at all. Perhaps I'd bring the timeline back to 2020? But that would require some horrific juggling of all the other dates and it might not be worth it! At any rate, it's not really supposed to be accurate - for something approaching accuracy, I wrote 'The Handbook: surviving and living with climate change' (though that's probably out of date by now too) - Caddy's Melbourne is just one version of what Melbourne 2030 might be like in one universe.
I did fix one thing though: just as the book was about to go to print I noticed that Simon and Sarah's dad, in about 1989, was ordering maps of the US off the internet. Even in my messed up view of the universe I couldn't let that happen.