Liz Hall has died. “Elsewhere,” Liz soon learns, is what happens next. Gabrielle Zevin’s quirky, funny, and tender story is about a fifteen-year-old who must mourn the family and friends she has left behind—and the future she has lost— before she is able to notice that life is going on, if not quite as she expected. People in Elsewhere continue to age, but in reverse, the years rolling back one by one until they’re infants ready to be reborn. Liz’s grandmother (dead at 50; now 34) died before Liz was born, but now they are getting to know each other. Liz gets a job doing something she loves—working with (recently deceased) animals. Love is even in the air after Liz meets Owen (dead at 26, now 17), who teaches Liz how to drive. Liz and Owen’s budding relationship is temporarily sidetracked when Owen’s beloved wife dies (they’re reunited but it doesn’t work out. Life—and death—has changed them both too much). And so Liz and Owen are free to grow young together as Liz comes to understand that death is another dimension of life, and it, too, is surely worth living. (Ages 12–17)

'Elsewhere' is about the redemptive power of love. When Linz finds herself in a bank bad aboard de SS Nile she thinks she must be dreaming. How else to explain the stranger in the top bunk and the appearance of an oddly precocious seven-year-old dressed as the capitain? When she eventually desembarks she is greeted by her grandmother, Betty, who died before Liz was born. Gradually, Liz comes to understand that she's dead, killed in a hit-and-run accident - she's now living in Elsewhere where no one grows older, only younger until they eventually return to Earth to be born. But admitting it is one thing, acceptance quite another. Liz refuses to get to know her new world, adamant that she wants her old life back, and watches her old world from the Observation Deck at every opportunity. When she gathers her courage and try to take the only route back to Earth, she mets Owen and, with the help of her new friend Sadie, the loveable mutt, begins to see that she's made a new beginning after all.