About this ebook
* 2022 Benjamin Franklin Award – Silver Winner *
In a chance encounter on the overnight train from Paris to Barcelona, Vikram Bhat stumbles across a promising new recruit. Miles Townsend, an 18-year-old kid running away from a past he’d just as soon forget, is drawn to the older Indian man, dazzled by Barcelona, and smitten with the Hotel Kashmir’s bartender, Anna de Wit, a Surinamese grad student with a genius for languages and Vikram’s first recruit.
Miles and Anna have no idea they’re being recruited. They have no idea that Vikram is neither an Indian nor a man, or that he’s a few thousand light-years from home. He has a lot of secrets, it turns out. But he means well. When a series of bad decisions reveals the fact that Vikram isn’t the only one light-years from home—and this other one does not mean well—Miles and Anna become unwitting ambassadors to Vikram’s world, a place where the locals haven’t got their sh*t together any better than the people of Earth.
A unique coming-of-age story, Any Other World Will Do is inventive, irreverent science fiction, a wry commentary on the primal urge to flee our troubles and the romantic way we remember the journey.
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About the author
Alex Lubertozzi has been a writer and editor since the Clinton administration. He has coauthored two works of nonfiction—The Complete War of the Worlds (2001) and World War II on the Air (2003)—written for numerous books and magazines, and had his short fiction published in The Arcanist. He has been composing fiction for most of his life (if you count lying), but Any Other World Will Do is his first novel. He lives in the Chicago area with his wife and son.
