The 23rd Hero

<p><strong style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>NEW YORK <em>TIMES</em> essayist and </strong><strong style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 255 1)>2025 Audie Awards® finalist</strong><strong style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)> Rebecca Anne Nguyen's stunning debut. In <em>The 23rd Hero</em> an ordinary woman with an extraordinary memory travels back in time to 16th-century France to stop climate change before it starts and return to the man she loves.</strong><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(30 25 21 1)> </span><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>In a world ravaged by climate change a mysterious time travel agency known as the Program sends carefully selected Heroes back in time on missions to prevent environmental damage before it happens. Sloane Burrows secretly longs to be a Hero and restore the natural world of her childhood-a world she can envision with absolute clarity because of her superpower memory. But her father raised Sloane to believe her freak memory is a shameful flaw that should be hidden from the world. Sloane stuffs her dream of being a Hero and conceals her memory to the point of making herself sick. Her only respite from the shame is the recurring dream she's been having for nearly a decade. In it a breathtakingly beautiful man makes her feel accepted in a way she never has in waking life-not despite her memory but because of it. But when the man in the dream shows up in real life Sloane's world is turned upside down. Not only is Bastian a flesh-and-blood person but he's from the Program and he wants her to do the one thing that will shatter her chances of winning her dad's love: become a Hero travel back in time to sixteenth-century France and use her superpower memory to save the world</span><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>. </span><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(30 25 21 1)>A</span><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> page-turning wild and marvelous ride. </span><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>- Susan Choi Pulitzer Prize finalist and National Book Award Winner for </span><em style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Trust Exercise. </em></p><p></p>