Oona Out of Order

Oona Out of Order is a novel by the American writer Margarita Montimore, published in 2020. It takes the idea of time travel and applies it to a single life rather than to history.

Oona Lockhart is eighteen on New Year's Eve in 1982, with an important decision in front of her: whether to go to London to study economics or to stay in Brooklyn, where her music and her boyfriend are. As the countdown ends she faints.

She wakes up in her fifty-one-year-old body, in a house she is told is hers, being greeted by a stranger she has never met, thirty-two years after the night she remembers. Each New Year she then leaps into another year of her own life, so that her body and her circumstances change while her memory does not, and she has to work out how to live a life whose events arrive out of order. Notes left for her by her previous selves, and the people who have stayed in her life, are what she has to work with. The novel follows her through the decades she is given.