Shoes in the Hallway: What if you could talk to your future selves?

For anyone who has been quietly carrying a question.

On a midweek evening in late autumn, he sits in his usual restaurant, as he has done for months: writing a question into his phone, and deleting it. The question is always the same one. Years into a corporate career he is no longer sure he wants, with a business idea he has never had the nerve to start. And he keeps asking himself: should I quit?

This time, a woman he has never seen before sits down at his table. She places a small white card between them and tells him that she can help with his question. Then she leaves. That night, he downloads an app. The app lets him speak with two future versions of himself: one who stayed and climbed the corporate ladder, the other who quit and built the company. Both real enough to argue with. Both certain they made the right call, but quietly resentful of the life they didn’t get to live. Across four months of conversations, some tender, some combative, some that end with him closing his laptop mid-sentence, he asks them the question he’s been circling for eighteen months: which one is happier? The answer, when it finally comes, is not the one he expected.

He also discovers, slowly, that the conversations are not what they appear to be. That the woman at the corner table has not gone away, and that a tool that lets you consult your future is also a tool that gives someone else considerable power over which future you choose.

Shoes in the Hallway is a novel about ambition, doubt, technology, and the architecture of an unmade decision. It is not a guide for how to decide and doesn’t pretend to have that answer. But for anyone who has sat with the same question late at night - corporate job or the leap, safety or the unknown - this is a story that sits with you in it, rather than telling you what to do. It will be of particular interest to readers of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library, and Blake Crouch’s Recursion.