On a frigid night in December 2020 in rural Minnesota, 18-year-old Ash sneaks out of the house, needing a break from the tension of her parents’ constant fighting. Her grandmother Goma has recently died of COVID, and Frank, the father of her best friend, Leigh, has died by suicide. His funeral is the next morning. Realizing she has accidentally locked herself out in the middle of the night – and getting no response from her parents inside – Ash walks through a blizzard to the nearest neighbour’s house, but passes out before she’s able to rouse anyone.

When she awakes, Ash is inside an unfamiliar house being watched over by the strangely attentive Lucille and a mysterious doctor intent on providing her with some vague “help.” The house is devoid of modern technology. All the windows are covered. And Ash is unable to clear her head; she is in a constant fog of confusion. After some time she manages to piece together that not only are the doctor and Lucille drugging her, but that she has awoken in the year 2001, the year of the Sept. 11 attacks – and the year she was born.

Even as she tries to figure out how to escape and return to her time, Ash contemplates whether she might be able to change events from the past that could solve major problems that plague her life in the present day. Right before Ash was born, her brother died of SIDS, and his death remains a point of considerable trauma and pain for her alcoholic father. Frank, who enlisted in the U.S. military after 9/11, returned home with severe PTSD, and this eventually led to his suicide. If Ash manages to escape, can she save her infant brother and her friend’s father?

Carter has a genuine appreciation for classic time-travel narratives and the thought experiments they encourage, and she layers the novel with references and allusions to these texts: “so many books: slim novels about kids who slip through portals into strange landscapes and have to find their way back home, or black-covered texts philosophizing on the supernatural, the importance of talismans, walking counterclockwise … books explaining things like string theory, quantum tunnelling.”

Working within that tradition, Carter does something different by exploring various concepts through the lens of trauma, “how it messes up the hippocampus from recording endings, so the situation seems to still be happening. A time traveller stuck in the literal past.” The Longest Night explores personal trauma through Ash’s current predicament, her parents’ grief for their lost child, Frank’s PTSD, as well as the cultural and collective shocks experienced from events like 9/11, the Black Lives Matter protests and the events that led to them, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Carter thoughtfully unpacks the emotional journey that moving through time might entail; the literal nuts-and-bolts of how time travel works are often glossed over, but they are admittedly not that important. She employs magic realism to her advantage to explore a supernatural occurrence through genuine and realistic characters. How or why Ash travels through time isn’t the focus; what she does and how it affects her and the people around her are what’s important and interesting about the novel.

Carter takes a bold leap with The Longest Night, trusting readers will follow the complexity of the concept without fixating on the mechanics. While the events described are impossible, working realistically through the emotions and feelings that might arise from such circumstances is one of literature’s great joys. On this front, Carter smoothly delivers.