Circular Motion

A brilliantly imagined literary debut of love, despair, and two people’s search for belonging in a world literally spinning out of control

The acceleration of Earth’s spin begins gradually. At first, days are just a few seconds shorter than normal. Awareness of the mysterious phenomenon hasn’t reached Tanner, a young man preoccupied with dreams of escaping his tiny Alaskan hometown. One night, desperate to make his mark on the world, he runs away. He lands an unlikely job at CWC, the operator of a network of massive aircraft that orbit the Earth at 30,000 feet, revolutionizing global transportation. Now goods and people can travel anywhere in little more than an hour—you can visit Paris for an evening or order sushi from Japan. But just as Tanner settles into his new life and begins to consider if his feelings for a male colleague might be more than platonic, CWC is shaken by a wave of social unrest and protest.

That unrest sweeps up Winnie. A high school outcast in an era of street protests, wild parties, and online savagery, Winnie falls in with a group of teen activists who blame CWC for the planet’s acceleration. As days on Earth quicken to twenty-three hours, then twenty, the sun rising and setting ever faster, causing violent storms and political meltdowns, Tanner and Winnie’s stories spiral closer together. They meet cynical executives toiling to forestall the crises they created and religious zealots for whom the apocalypse can’t come soon enough, lobbyists and lovers all coping in their own ways, and Victor Bickle—the self-aggrandizing TV scientist whose shameful secret will bind Tanner and Winnie’s fates . . . if they can uncover it before the Earth spins so fast that even gravity might lose its grip.

Three-hour days. Two-hour days . . .

A propulsive exploration of capitalism, technology, and our place within a system that dwarfs us, Circular Motion is one of the most ingenious debut novels of our time.

Alex Foster received his MFA from New York University, where he served as fiction editor of Washington Square Review. He now edits books at Henry Holt and Company and Metropolitan. Previously, he studied economics at the University of Chicago and conducted research for the U.S. government and for the World Bank’s Gender Innovation Lab in West Africa. Circular Motion is his first novel.