The Space Between Worlds by Miciah Johnson

 

Cara is an outsider wherever she goes.  She grew up in the wastelands, desperate to get out and do something with her life.  She was the mistress of the emperor but that was a perilous position as he beat her constantly, bringing her repeatedly to the brink of death.  When Cara finds a woman dying on the wastelands one day and hears a voice coming from a transmitter, she takes the woman's place, not knowing what she is doing.

What she is doing is being someone who travels between worlds.  A scientist has discovered the travel process and now heads up a massive corporation, selling data to those who want to know about other worlds.  There are over four hundred worlds that can be traveled to, but there is one caveat; you must be dead in the world you are traveling to.

Cara is dead in over three hundred of those worlds and soon is one of the top travelers.  In some worlds, the emperor she knew is in power, in others he is on the outside.  Cara's family is always there but she can not visit them as they know she is dead.  She slides between power plays in governments and soon in the company she is working for.  Can she ever find peace?

This is Micaiah Johnson's debut novel and it made quite a splash.  It was a finalist for the Locust Award and won the Compton Crook Award while being named one of the year's best books by NPR and Library Journal.  It is an intricate work with Cara moving seamlessly between worlds while trying to discover what she wants her life to be and who she wants to have in it.  She struggles with whether she will have a relationship with her family and knows she wants a relationship with her handler, Dell, who she fantasizes about.  The world building is amazing and this author seems slated for fame in the science fiction genre.  This book is recommended for science fiction readers.