Rocket to the Past by S A Carmody

Book One of the Rocket to the Past time-travel series

Dr Liz Marsh has spent her life outrunning a past she never chose. Known as the daughter of an IRA bomber and orphaned at eighteen, she has lived with scandal, grief, and the long memory of a village that never forgot.

Everything changes when a stranger in a hospital bed presses an antique brass key into her hand and whispers her childhood nickname. Hours later, the key burns through her pocket, a doorway opens in the dark, and Liz is pulled back to 7 October 1984.

Rainhill looks familiar, but nothing fits. The shops are open. The cars belong to another era. And standing in the doorway of her former home is her mother, alive and furious.

Liz soon realises she has not returned by accident. In five days, the Brighton bombing will begin a chain of events that destroys her family. Her father will be drawn into something he never understood, and Liz has one chance to stop it.

To save them, she must step into a past that already knows her and confront truths that were buried for a reason. Waiting in the shadows is the Rocket, the engine that brought her here, and whose key may be the only way home.

Rocket to the Past: Rainhill is the first novel in a time-travel series about history, consequence, and the moments that shape a life.

If you could rewrite the moment that broke you, would you dare?